Mark Zuckerberg – From Facebook, answering privacy concerns with new settings

Speaking up for the first time since f8 on the privacy mess.

Simply put, many of you thought our controls were too complex. Our intention was to give you lots of granular controls; but that may not have been what many of you wanted. We just missed the mark.

Facebook and Others Caught Sending User Data to Advertisers

Wow. Tough to say you really care about user privacy when you’re handing really private data over to advertisers. As an advertiser? I don’t even want this kind of information.

The Journal found that Facebook went farther than most in sharing identifiable data, by sending the username of the person clicking the ad as well as the username of the profile they were viewing at the time. This news could hardly come at a worse time for Facebook, a company that currently faces a privacy backlash potent enough to make the cover of Time Magazine this month.

Facebook and “radical transparency” (a rant)

Sometimes, what a person says is magnified 1,000 times by who says it. This is one of those times. Danah is a smart person. This is worth reading.

What I find most fascinating in all of the discussions of transparency is the lack of transparency by Facebook itself. Sure, it would be nice to see executives use the same privacy settings that they determine are the acceptable defaults. And it would be nice to know what they’re saying when they’re meeting.

At it’s core this is a question of the changing tide of our cultural evolution. Jarvis once again nails it here:

* As I suggested here, it should study 16th century history about the origins of the public and private and understand that it is playing with bigger, more powerful and profound forces than even it knows. I just wrote in my next book that we are undergoing a similar shift in how society organizes itself with similar tools. Mark Zuckerberg says that he is enabling big change in society. I say examine that belief.

Yes, there is great, deep value in history. We’ve been through this transition before. We are innately social creatures. But that hard-wiring is difficult to scale cleanly. Moving from tribes of connections to villages to cities to distributed networks causes strain on the system. It’s true, we’re probably moving away from some of our plainer collective sense of privacy, but that doesn’t mean we individually walk away from our right to chose how we make that journey.

Facebook Privacy: A Bewildering Tangle of Options – Graphic – NYTimes.com

This is fantastic. Note — two of the most important privacy options in Facebook are not actually available on the Facebook User Profile Privacy Settings page. How would someone just *know* that?

And, say what you will about Facebook transparency, there’s just no excuse for a privacy statement to be longer than the Constitution (minus amendments).

Facebook’s Gone Rogue; It’s Time for an Open Alternative | Epicenter | Wired.com

Is there a substantive alternative to Facebook on the horizon? Google? Anyone? Hullo?

So in December, with the help of newly hired Beltway privacy experts, it reneged on its privacy promises and made much of your profile information public by default. That includes the city that you live in, your name, your photo, the names of your friends and the causes you’ve signed onto.

This spring Facebook took that even further. All the items you list as things you like must become public and linked to public profile pages. If you don’t want them linked and made public, then you don’t get them — though Facebook nicely hangs onto them in its database in order to let advertisers target you.

This Week in Google – ep 41 offered a terrific discussion on the nature of trust. I’ve made fun of Jeff Jarvis in the past, mostly because of the paranoid hand-wringing that always seems to emanate from his general direction, but the world needs more people who think deeply about these issues — guys just like Jeff. In this case, his point is that while Google started out as a company vested in publishing your public information to the world at large, then transformed into a company offering more services targeted at maintaining your private life and connections, Facebook started out as a company dedicated to helping you connect with a private network, and has, over the years, moved the other direction. The result is a certain cognitive dissonance that people-who-think-deeply-about-such-things can’t quite assimilate.

Those of us who choose to live our lives in public are stuck between a rock and a hard place. I, for one, would love to find an alternative to Facebook with simpler controls. The sometimes unfortunate nature of networks is this: you have to go where the people are if you want to do more than shout at an empty room.

A few months ago, I wrote a post about how to get more out of Facebook. My intent, at the time, was to write a series on configuring the application to protect your privacy, reduce Facebook apps annoyance, and allow you to connect with the people that are important in your life. I got one post into the series and got swept away by events. When I finally got back to it this week, I started digging into the terms and options after the last round of Facebook updates and have come to a frustrating realization: I think the original intent of my series is now impossible to deliver.

First, take a look at this visualization by Matt McKeon demonstrating the change in Facebook default privacy settings over time. If you have some time, peruse the comments, which have a few interesting points:

One thing which is almost as interesting is how much the effectiveness of the “most restrictive” non-default has also gone down in a similar pattern. Not only have the (enormously powerful) defaults become super-permissive, but facebook has reduced the ability of concerned parties, or really the small subset willing to keep constantly twiddling their privacy settings, to keep their private data private.

and…

There is this bizarre meme running through the press that, somehow, Facebook has a MONOPOLY on publishing personal information, and that we are all pawns in some sort of vicious commercial game, but that somehow we can’t STOP being on Facebook.

On the first point: given the convoluted nature of the latest privacy options panel, I’d be interested in data on the size of that subset since April 1, 2010.

On the second point: What Facebook has isn’t a monopoly. Monopolistic practices don’t enter in to this discussion. What’s disturbing is that Facebook has collected a massive amount of data on each of us, and has a documented history of changing the way they present that data — and to whom they present it — with each evolution of policy. The implication is that data I gave to Facebook under terms I once agreed to, is now offered publicly under terms I no longer agree to (or potentially understand), with limited clear method for user intervention.

If you’re more of a reader, check out this piece on BusinessInsider. In it, there’s a great review of salient language from the Facebook Privacy Policy as it was at each update from 2005 to present. The most interesting line is this from the update in April, 2010:

If you are uncomfortable with the connection being publicly available, you should consider removing (or not making) the connection.

I’d sure be interested in someone more lawyerly than I am to translate that bit, cause here’s how I read it: If you don’t like it, don’t use it.

Come to think of it, pretty damned good advice, that.

Facebook’s E-mail Censorship is Legally Dubious, Experts Say | Epicenter | Wired.com

Not sure this should be a surprise, but Facebook sniffs email content exchanged on the built-in messaging platform, then censors that content. I haven’t tested this.

As outlined in the post, it’s not unusual for content to be deconstructed algorithmically, it’s done all the time. And email shouldn’t be considered private by any stretch. But the fact that Facebook is then censoring that data wholesale amps up the discussion about Facebook falling out of favor with some.

Wired.com ran a test using a torrent file linked on the Pirate Bay to confirm:

Wired.com confirmed Facebook is blocking private messages by sending a link to a Pirate Bay torrent feed of a book in the public domain. Such content is freely available to everyone, as all copyrights have expired. Nevertheless, the message bounced twice, returning the following failure notice: “This Message Contains Blocked Content. Some content in this message has been reported as abusive by Facebook users.” (Facebook’s link-censoring system is may be just tilting at windmills, however, because removing a single vowel from the domain name lets the URL go through.)

In the case of Wired.com’s test, there were only two Facebook users who should have been aware of the content — Wired.com editor John C. Abell and his message’s intended recipient, who was sitting five feet from him — and neither had the slightest objection to it whatsoever.

The whole post is worth reading.

As much as I love Google products, and use them daily, here is a perky brick to the ethical head. The following quote is from Google CEO Eric Schmidt in the current CNBC Google Blockbuster.

If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place, but if you really need that kind of privacy, the reality is that search engines including Google do retain this information for some time, and it’s important, for example that we are all subject in the United States to the Patriot Act. It is possible that that information could be made available to the authorities.

When Google was founded in 1998, the company hung its proverbial hat on telling the world that they would be successful without mucking things up in the process. Specifically, number six in the company’s own manifesto:

6. You can make money without doing evil.

This is all well and good until, for example, you’re a global titan with $12 billion and change in the bank, competing for telcom spectrum in an industry as messed up as wireless. What’s that they say about laying down with dogs?

I have lots and lots of problems with the quote, but the crux of my issue with Schmidt’s position here is that it would appear the company’s position operates on the assumption that there is no need for privacy in a world in which you are not actually doing evil. I don’t so much care how Eric treats his own private life, but that he would deem to umbrella my own personal feelings on the matter with his is more than a touch unnerving.

That Google, and others, complies with the current state of the law by invading ones privacy is one thing. It’s generally unpalatable, but not surprising. But that this same distaste for individual privacy advocacy has apparently taken hold at the highest levels of a company we historically have trusted with so much of our collective should be enough to trigger a second or third look at just what we’re storing in the Google cloud.

For that information, head over to your Google Dashboard. This is a new tool from the company designed to give you a snapshot of just how much information you’ve volunteered to share; from Gmail to Voice to Docs to Analytics and more, you’ll see everything that Google sees as belonging to inescapable you.

But that’s only half the story. There appear to be some open questions about just what Google knows about you that doesn’t pop up on the dashboard. And those are the questions we must continue to push, in the tide of the changing face of Google.