Corvus Consulting

Some folks wanting to get the word out about what the privacy changes in Facebook mean have been using its API to show what people are posting. In doing so, they make the point that these people likely don’t realize that what they are posting is being shared beyond their friends.

Openbook, the latest to do so, falls into the same problem as pleaserobme.com, which collected tweets and status updates to indicate who was not at home, and personally identified those people and where they lived. Pleaserobme thankfully shut down the service having ‘made their point’.

It takes a certain measure of cruelty to exploit the people you’re trying to protect in order to make your point, much like a person who wants to show how dangerous handguns are starts to go around shooting at people. The right way to make a point like pleaserobme.com or Openbook is to pull the data but obscure the images and names. We don’t need individual identities to believe that the data is real nor to make the point, which is an important one.

And what we really don’t need is to have the damage that Facebook is inflicting on its members amplified by someone trying to make a point. Remember, it’s the people who don’t understand the technology who are getting hurt here, now by two parties instead of just one.

It’s good to see people talking about Facebook’s dissolution of the privacy walls its members were accustomed to. With any active discussion you get disagreement, but I wasn’t ready to see sentiments suggesting that people deserve embarrassing exposure because they made the mistake of trusting Facebook, or any web service for that matter.

Chris Pirillo, long standing web citizen, really surprised me with this tweet today:

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It would be disheartening to watch Facebook’s radical dissolution of privacy walls and their reach into the rest of the web had there not been an outpouring of concern and criticism from many smart people. The best commentary I’ve read so far:

• Liz Gannes wrote an early but spot-on assessment of how Instant Personalization tries to force a new norm onto the web, where you can be known to any website so long as you’re signed into Facebook.
• Thomas Vanderwal captures the problematic situations that Facebook creates by steadily deprecating privacy.
• Sarah Perez at ReadWriteWeb, the site name I still can’t say quickly, writes about the strong-arm tenor in the privacy options transitioning interfaces.

There’s a lot to chew on with the moves that Facebook is making, but after seeing NewsFeed, Beacon and now the latest in F8, a pattern of behaviour emerges that I don’t think I can live with anymore:

1. Establish a norm that people are comfortable with.
2. Allow trust to be built on that norm
3. Impose without warning a new set of rules that are advantageous to themselves alone.
4. Architect the new reality as a labyrinth of vaguely worded options that must be absorbed and understood in real time, as the changes they refer to already happened.
5. Wait until the audience reaches a point of comfortable non-awareness or total submission. Unless sponsors complain, like they did with Beacon.

Facebook isn’t the only company to deploy technological changes without warning or consideration of their impact on real lives. But, taking a line from Rush, they’re old enough to know what’s right and weak enough not to choose it.

What happened, Facebook? You used to put on such great parties: at your place we could hang out with the people around us and share in a way that was comfortable and carefree. Our mistake was believing that a respect for privacy, which you used to do well, was inherent to your character. Now we know better, but we still have to ask, what happened?

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If you don’t know the story of the Magician’s Apprentice, you should, because it’s a fantastic cautionary tale for the age of the technological commons. When the wizard, who is older and wiser, steps out for a while, the apprentice decides to use one of his spells to naively ‘make life easier’. Enchanted brooms begin to carry in buckets of water, but they don’t stop and multiply at every attempt to stop them, leading to an uncontrollable flood.

With Google’s engineering-first, consequences-later approach, we’re hitting a point where the brooms are getting out of control and the water is starting to rise. With Buzz, we have yet another deployment of their notion of a well-meaning science experiment that ignores our human reality. While it’s never classy to link to TechCrunch, this post by Robin Wauters deserves mention for bringing to light a failure in trust and social savvy on Google’s part. The quotable section is actually pulled from another blog that is now behind a password wall:

I use my private Gmail account to email my boyfriend and my mother.
There’s a BIG drop-off between them and my other “most frequent” contacts.

You know who my third most frequent contact is?
My abusive ex-husband.

Which is why it’s SO EXCITING, Google, that you AUTOMATICALLY allowed all my most frequent contacts access to my Reader, including all the comments I’ve made on Reader items, usually shared with my boyfriend, who I had NO REASON to hide my current location or workplace from, and never did.

The practice of foisting a new social networking reality onto people who happen to use your product is inexcusable, and Google is not alone in doing so but its mass (like that of Facebook’s) brings along with it the responsibility of treading more carefully.

Given Google’s preference to beg for forgiveness rather than ask for permission, their impulsive changes to the terms of social engagement through their tools have tarnished the trust around their brand, and may have put people in physical danger at the extreme end of things. The problem is, there’s no wise wizard who can come back and right the mess that these well-meaning apprentice’s have made.

A growing theme in new web 2.0 services is what I’ll loosely call location streaming, or the ability to transmit changes in your physical location to various networks on the web. Smart-phones of all kinds now have access to infrastructures (both on wifi or cellular networks) that can place their location reliably and quite precisely. This capability has arrived scary-fast, after a long period of hearing that “someday” it would be real. The future always seems to arrive while you’re out having a coffee.

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If you’ve been watching my bookmarks in the sidebar or through a feed, you’ll know I’ve been watching Fred Stutzman’s thoughts on Facebook, the social networking website for students. As I dig into Fred’s work, I realized this was worth a blog post and not just some links on the side.

What I like about Fred’s writing on Facebook is that he doesn’t just comment; he gets involved by advising students and faculties on how to engage a social software phenomenon while keeping in mind important things like privacy. His blog also documents the evolution of issues from the perspective of a researcher, which should be required reading for anyone managing or designing social software.

You can find all of his Facebook articles with this search, and he provides a summary post on his research as well.