Wired's Right: Facebook has Gone Rogue

Image via Wikipedia

Technology Thursday

As could have been predicted, privacy at Facebook, or the lack thereof, continues to make headlines. I've never been particularly fond of their interface or services, but there are people on Facebook I want to stay in touch with who aren't anywhere else. My solution was to simply pipe my Twitter feed into status updates and call it good, while occasionally 'liking' or commenting on other people's status updates. But the latest round of complete disregard for user preferences coupled with the evidence that they have only degraded their own privacy options over time really ticked me off.

EFF pulled together a timeline of Facebook's evolving approach to user control of their information. Consider that in 2005 the policy was:

No personal information that you submit to Thefacebook will be available to any user of the Web Site who does not belong to at least one of the groups specified by you in your privacy settings.

And now in 2010 it's something completely vague but ominous:

When you connect with an application or website it will have access to General Information about you. The term General Information includes your and your friends’ names, profile pictures, gender, user IDs, connections, and any content shared using the Everyone privacy setting. ... The default privacy setting for certain types of information you post on Facebook is set to “everyone.” ... Because it takes two to connect, your privacy settings only control who can see the connection on your profile page. If you are uncomfortable with the connection being publicly available, you should consider removing (or not making) the connection.

The last straw for me, though, was this piece in Wired that suggests they'll be disclosing and aggregating your data in ways potentially totally contrary to anything you'd want, simply by virtue of keyword matching.

Now, say you you write a public update, saying, “My boss had a crazy great idea for a new product!” Now, you might not know it, but there is a Facebook page for “My Crazy Boss” and because your post had all the right words, your post now shows up on that page. Include the words “FBI” or “CIA,” and you show up on the FBI or CIA page.

The New York Times has weighed in and decided to provide us all with a helpful graphic of the incredibly complicated ways in which privacy settings currently work at Facebook. They note: "To manage your privacy on Facebook, you will need to navigate through 50 settings with more than 170 options." The graphic is worth taking a peek at. Setting aside disregard for user preferences, and the morality of privacy violations, the byzantine nature of their approach bespeaks extremely poor engineering (which, frankly, has been evident at Facebook for a long time)

So, I've decided to stop sending my Twitter feed into Facebook and will slowly, as I have time, be removing information. I'll still maintain a presence there, at least for now, but apart from occasional commenting and very occasional status updates, I don't expect to be doing much there. There really does need to be an open and sane replacement, though, as some aspects of FB's service fill a niche not filled elsewhere.

Comments

[Katherine]

Thanks for these helpful links. What really drives me crazy about Facebook is that you can't opt out! It's so huge that, as you say, you have to be on it.

My solution is not to post anything too personal -- no pictures of my kids, no complaints about work that could come back to haunt me -- even though that kind of defeats the purpose! And I try not to get too annoyed by the targeted ads. Sigh.