Growing outcry over Facebook privacy changes

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The price of Facebook privacy?
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May 12, 2010 -- Pop quiz: Which is longer, the United States Constitution or Facebook’s Privacy Policy? If you guessed the latter, you’re right. Facebook’s Privacy Policy is 5,830 words long; the United States Constitution, without any of its amendments, is a concise 4,543 words. Facebook, one of the most popular social networks in the world, has more than 400 million registered people on its Web site. Half of these users log in to the service every day, the company says, and users spend 500 billion minutes on the site each month. But in recent months, Facebook has revised its privacy policy to require users to opt out if they wish to keep information private, making most of that information public by default. Some personal data is now being shared with third-party Web sites. As a result, the company has come under a blitz from privacy groups, government officials and its own users, who complain that the new policy is bewildering and the new opt-out settings too time-consuming to figure out and use. “There are always trade-offs between providing comprehensive and precise granular controls and offering simple tools that may be broad and blunt,” said Elliot Schrage, vice president for public policy at Facebook. “We have tried to offer the most comprehensive and detailed controls and comprehensive and detailed information about them.”

The new opt-out settings certainly are complex. Facebook users who hope to make their personal information private should be prepared to spend a lot of time pressing a lot of buttons. To opt out of full disclosure of most information, it is necessary to click through more than 50 privacy buttons, which then require choosing among a total of more than 170 options. Users must decide if they want only friends, friends of friends, everyone on Facebook, or a customized list of people to see things like their birthdays or their most recent photos. To keep information as private as possible, users must select “only friends” or “only me” from the pull-down options for all the choices in the privacy settings, and must uncheck boxes that say information will be shared across the Web. Facebook’s “Help Center” is available to assist users, but the word count for the privacy-related FAQ adds up to more than 45,000 words.

Even if a user changes all the settings on the privacy section of the site, certain pieces of information will still be shared across the site unless a user takes further action. For example, under the Account Settings option, in the Facebook Ads tab, two options are automatically turned on to share some information with advertising networks and friends. Anyone who wants to keep this information private must uncheck the boxes in that tab. And still, some information will no longer remain private because Facebook has also added a feature, called community pages, which automatically links personal data, like hometown or university, to topic pages for that town or university. The only way to disappear from those topic pages is to delete personal data from Facebook.

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Facebook is not your friend

If you care about your privacy and that of your real friends, unfriend Facebook now.
We are its product, not its customers

May 14, 2010 -- There is a wonderful graphic on the New York Times site showing how Facebook's privacy statement has got larger and larger to cover the growing holes in its privacy policy. The mapping isn't perfect: if it were, the declaration of Facebook's dedication to privacy would have to be of almost infinite size, since the default amount of privacy Facebook now offers is practically zero. When the site first started, very few people could join, and nothing became public, even to them, without the users' express permission. Now everyone can join and everything is public to almost all of them unless you make a determined effort to hide it. This effort has to be renewed every six months or so when Facebook revises its privacy policy to make it more opaque and less effective. There is a wonderfully graphic animation of the process at this site. If you decide it isn't worth it, Facebook turns out to be very difficult to leave. It is very easy to "deactivate" your account, but it's also almost meaningless. Nothing is deleted by deactivation. If you return a year later, your account is still there, with the same password, the same friends and all the same data.

It is difficult to overestimate how much a Facebook user tells the company about his or her life. I've just had a friend (in real life) look me and my children up on the system. She's not a friend of either on Facebook, and both are reasonably cautious about privacy. Nonetheless, it was immediately obvious what their interests were, and each had most of their social networks listed. Ten years ago, when the British government proposed to make traffic data available to a wide variety of agencies under the Regulation of Investigative Powers Act, there was an outcry from civil libertarians. Their point was that you hardly need to know what people are saying to each other if you know who they are talking to. And now Facebook knows and makes this information freely available to almost anyone. This may seem like a bad way to treat customers, but the whole point about Facebook is that users aren't customers. Anyone who supposes that Facebook's users are its customer has got the business model precisely backwards. Users pay nothing, because we aren't customers, but product. The customers are the advertisers to whom Facebook sells the information users hand over, knowingly or not.

Google, which collects less information about its users, is far more scrupulous about the uses to which it is put. Google also makes it much easier to remove your traces from the system. There is no equivalent on Facebook to Google's dashboard page, which shows you all the information you have made public across Google's sites; nor is it as easy to get back from Facebook information you have once put in. This isn't to diminish the extraordinary record of how we think that Google collects by simply tracking our queries, but Facebook collects more. That's what it's designed to do. The games and apps available there are an important part of this process. Almost all of these are simply devices to harvest information about players and use what they have found to sell themselves to everyone else on their contact list.

How can all or any of this be stopped? Facebook won't change. Its entire business model depends on selling privacy to advertisers. If public revulsion forces a halt, or a retreat it will start again in six months' time. This shouldn't really be surprising. What is to be done? The kind of computing infrastructure needed to run a global service like Facebook isn't cheap, and somebody has to pay for it. Perhaps a service more ethical about privacy than Facebook is being hatched in a garage somewhere right now. It's certainly possible, as the example of Google shows.

But the fundamental problem remains. Ever since money was invented, the people who have made money out of aimless chat have been the landlords, whether they were selling beer, coffee or a space on the web. You may think that your Facebook friends care what you're up to, but they'd drop you like a stone if it cost them money to learn you had just become imaginary mayor of an imaginary town, or even that you had just had a row with your mother and slammed the phone down. The only people to whom that information is worth even a fraction of a penny are those who want to take advantage of it to sell you something you don't need – except, that is for your real friends, but imaginary ones are so much more reassuring.

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Australian police are urging teenagers to take their personal details off social networking websites, after an 18-year-old woman was murdered. Police believe teenager Nona Belomesoff befriended her killer through the Facebook website. Belomesoff's body was found on May 14, two days after she embarked on an excursion with a man she met on the website, who told her that they were going to rescue hurt animals. Christopher James Dannevig, the 20-year-old man charged with the murder, is alleged to have established a fake Facebook profile and claimed on it to work for an animal welfare organisation. He is believed to have offered Belomesoff a job and to have encouraged her to take the camping trip with him. Belomesoff's body was later found at a creek south of Sydney. But as Al Jazeera's Alison Rourke reports from Sydney, many teenagers are oblivious to the risks going online can bring.....