Facebook is a brilliant online social networking tool, but with power comes temptation.

Facebook logo.

Social networking is the hot buzz these days, with Facebook being the latest Web 2.0 site to offer connections amongst people. The virtue of these online applications, and especially Facebook, is in creating a new way of keeping in touch which wouldn’t have been possible before the internet. I can now play Scrabble with friends and family on the other side of the world, maintain contact with friends from high school who I haven’t spoken to in years, and poke Yogi in Vancouver where he can’t get me back (well he can poke me back). Where Facebook differs from MySpace, SecondLife and the plethora of other sites is the ideas of authenticity, privacy and trust. To quote Facebook’s about page:

At Facebook, we believe that people should have control over how they share their information and who can see it. People can only see the profiles of confirmed friends and the people in their networks. You can use our privacy settings at any time to control who can see what on Facebook.1

And more importantly on their privacy policy page:

Facebook follows two core principles:

1. You should have control over your personal information.
Facebook helps you share information with your friends and people around you. You choose what information you put in your profile, including contact and personal information, pictures, interests and groups you join. And you control the users with whom you share that information through the privacy settings on the My Privacy page.

2. You should have access to the information others want [my emphasis] to share.
There is an increasing amount of information available out there, and you may want to know what relates to you, your friends, and people around you. We want to help you easily get that information.2

Recently a furor has arisen over a new service called Beacon. It allows third party websites to send alerts to your Facebook profile. “How does it do this?” you might ask. Facebook stores your login id on your computer using a cookie and then shares this information with the participating third party websites. “By default, we use a persistent cookie that stores your login ID”.3 When this service was first set up, it was ‘opt out’ only. This is online jargon for you are automatically signed up for this service unless you take the time and effort to de-register yourself. Unfortunately this meant a lot of people had nasty surprises when doing their Christmas shopping only to find that the presents they bought were unwittingly added to their Facebook alerts. It also turns out then even if you opt out of the service and are logged off the website, Facebook still collects information regarding what actions you perform on these third party sites.

This is not the first time that Facebook has courted controversy. Earlier this year it announced it was to release user information to Google search which users again have to opt out of (you can do it here). A New York State investigation into false safety claims prompted it to post sterner warnings and speed up dealing with complaints. Unbelievably on their privacy page I found the following line referring to recommending a friend to Facebook:

Your friend may contact us at info@facebook.com to request that we remove this information from our database. ((http://www.facebook.com/policy.php)

Not only is this sort of unsolicited information gathering an online marketing no-no and illegal in New Zealand, but I am personally sorry to everyone I have sent a prompt through Facebook who has not subsequently signed up. Oh and by the way, Facebook has your email address and won’t remove it unless you specifically ask them. The British Goverment didn’t just lose 25 million records of far more sensitive information did they? If you have nothing to hide you have nothing to fear right? Identity fraud doesn’t exist does it?

Mark Zuckerburg.Which brings me to the title of this post: ‘do no evil’. This unofficial motto of Google may lead it open to criticsm but so far its simplicity of message and attempt to adhere to it has meant that it has remained relatively untarnished during its eight year reign as the search king. In comparison as soon as Facebook’s service exploded in use earlier this year, it has been surrounded by privacy controversy. This is not surprising given that 23 year old founder Mark Zuckerburg has global domination ambitions, and the whole history of Facebook has murky beginnings where he appears to have stolen the concept from people he was working with. Basically this little punk is not to be trusted with the level of personal detail that we are giving him.

Unfortunately like lemmings, the online viewers in the upcoming movie Untraceable, or western governments at the Bali Summit on Climate Change, we are marching ourselves willingly to an unfavourable end. This is a real shame yet utterly logical as the benefits of Facebook are, at least in my eyes, enormous. Hopefully given Facebook’s ability to create massive political swells on certain issues we will see a movement from within to force it to accept a mantra similar to ‘do no evil’. Then again, I just discovered this article.

Update

Facebook have issued a formal apology for Beacon here. You can deactivate it at the privacy page. I still think he is a little punk though.

  1. http://www.facebook.com/about.php [↩]
  2. http://www.facebook.com/policy.php [↩]
  3. http://www.facebook.com/policy.php [↩]

Comments

  1. Rachel

    hmmm interesting….

    119:218 11:59, Dec 07 2007

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