
Facebook enters the age of accidental oversharing - iProject
http://money.cnn.com/2012/06/11/technology/facebook-oversharing-airtime/index.htm
======
grandalf
Facebook had discovered a very sweet blind spot in the human social awareness
system.

One person posts a picture and a friend comments on it, then mutual friends
(such as those who are oddly curious about the poster of the picture or
someone in it) can take a quick glimpse at that person's life. This is
rewarded by the brain with a small shot of dopamine.

This is a function not of the social graph itself (friend) but of the
addictive nature of the fleeting glimpses it allows people to have of others.

Suppose you have 500 friends who each have several hundred friends. Some
subset of those friends constitutes your "fascination graph". Maybe you think
they are hot, maybe you aspire to their lifestyle, maybe you hated them in
high school, etc. etc.

In order to continue to succeed, Facebook (and app makers) have to realize
that it's not the mundane behaviors of your Facebook friends that are
interesting... it's the allure of those on the fascination graph that
generates the dopamine and the slot machine-addict kind of clicking that is
gold to advertisers.

Facebook has managed to deliver this dopamine in a way that's not creepy
(nobody has to go through anyone's garbage, etc.) so the question is, is it
ever going to start to seem creepy?

~~~
phwd
It would get more creepy, the more media spins Facebook as a privacy nightmare
and the more tech-minded users persuade their friends that Facebook is leaking
everything, which they are not. There is a privacy problem but not to the
extent most people wave hands about it.

It's funny when you think about it, in the earlier years, you had the network
search tool. Basically all profiles were public and you could search based on
age, country, gender, university... everything. I could literally narrow down
searches to people on a street. Was it really more private then? No? Then what
changed? At what point will privacy be fulfilled and can one really call it a
_social_ network at that point?

There is Diaspora, if privacy is really what users want then, why haven't we
seen a massive conversion to Diaspora?

~~~
grandalf
I think you hit upon the gist of it which is that users don't care. The same
could be said about users' general complacency about the tracking/storage
Google does.

Users are generally right, it doesn't matter in most cases. No harm is being
done... yet.

The general trend is toward services that do not make privacy optional and
that require the users to accept a narrower range data collection and
advertisement policies in order to use the service.

In time (maybe in 5-10 years) getting on the internet will require accepting
terms that basically give up lots of privacy and anonymity. (My other
prediction is that we'll see the return of interruption ads that cannot be
skipped for nearly all content, or every 7 or 8 minutes during a typical
internet usage setting).

The above is why investors are paying so much money for shares of Google and
Facebook. Both are a combination of internet gatekeeper and data collector.
Both are awaiting the right moment so they can enter the "last mile" business.
In the meantime, the fact that users don't care is just gravy.

Incidentally, the most relevant consequence of this in today's world is that
both firms are happy to do whatever powerful governments want. Facebook and
Google are destined to become the next Halliburton and Ratheon as cyber
warfare and terrorism loom large as threats to security and government finds
itself horribly data-poor compared to private firms.

~~~
zaphar
Users don't care _yet_. I think this will be looked on as a blip some time in
the future. Once enough of the this generation has enough embarrassing or
undesired information shared there will be a shift. They don't value the
privacy yet because they haven't learned the value of it yet. I say give them
time. Eventually they will learn that value and then the Facebook and company
will have will see people wanting to control it.

------
jnorthrop
From the article: "Oliver Cameron, founder of a private social network called
Everyme, says most of the responsibility lies with developers. 'The apps that
are implementing this could do a better job,' he says. 'The average Facebook
user has no clue what they're sharing.'

I couldn't agree more with this sentiment. If we, the startup community, can't
figure out a way of being transparent about our intentions with user's
personal information in a way that makes sense to them, we will suffer a
backlash. We risk facing a cultural shift where it becomes hip to "drop out"
of a social online society.

This has already started to some extent as people become more aware of the
risks of oversharing (as pointed out in the article) but it could quickly
become more pervasive.

~~~
unimpressive
> We risk facing a cultural shift where it becomes hip to "drop out" of a
> social online society.

And? While this might scare the sizable portion of HN readers who have money
staked on social, I would see this as a net positive.

EDIT: No but really, besides the Arab Spring social media has spammed the
world with cute cat pictures and eaten away at the blogosphere. The portions
eaten away are subsumed into one of the competing walled gardens. The web
wasn't designed to be an echo chamber.

~~~
smoyer
I'm not sure why this was down-voted ... isn't "dropping out" just the extreme
version of reduced usage? There was an article posted last week that described
users as being tired of FB and that there was a 30% drop in engagement (I'll
link later if I can find it).

------
crazygringo
My biggest problem is that, last I checked, I don't have the option to prevent
a Facebook app from auto-sharing things at the moment of installing it.

Instead, I have to agree to install it, _then_ go to my privacy settings,
_then_ remove its permission to auto-share.

Nowadays I just refuse to install apps.

~~~
AJ007
This is how I solved Facebook's over sharing problem: I don't use Facebook
apps. If I need to, such as for business, I run it through a dummy account.

Had Facebook taken the path of not fucking around with privacy settings, I
might be more open to Facebook's apps. However their intentions are clear,
given events such as: automatically opting in to new email alerts even through
I've disabled all other Facebook e-mail alerts, continually changing the
privacy settings page resulting in the removal of past privacy options,
allowing "friends" to add me to groups I wish to be no part of, un-hiding
comments to my page which I have marked as either spam or offensive, and so
on.

The end result is a Facebook which I use to look at photos and tell girls to
Skype me and not much else. While I may notice these things right as they
happen, for other non-technical users their happiness with Facebook slowly
erodes away and they can't quite pin point it.

As Facebook continues to add more and more "noise", the chances of a
competitor being able to beat Facebook at their own game increases.

While the analogy may be overused, albeit in a different manner, Google was
able to beat Yahoo not only because it was a better search engine but because
it had a lot less noise. While Facebook appears to be the Google of social
networking, the sheer amount of "noise" in my news feed tells me otherwise.

(A note for users of both Facebook, Twitter, bloggers, etc: the amount of
"noise" you produce is directly relational to how much people whose ideas
matter pay attention to you. The friends who are over sharing get blocked from
my Facebook news feed. The Twitter users that tweet about their cat grooming
habits are un-followed. And so on. I am extremely cautious what gets posted to
my feed, and when it does, people remember what I posted.)

~~~
efa
Yep, me too. Those SocialCam videos are so enticing! I click but when prompted
to install I resist.

It's so f'ing annoying that you can't even follow a link (like anything on
Yahoo) without installing the app. I just do a separate Google search for the
story title instead of installing the app. At some point there is less sharing
going on. I'm more likely NOT to check out what my friend read because of
this.

------
redwood
Not just this... Facebook's _BASE_ privacy settings for basic sharing on wall
posts/timeline etc are extremely counter-intuitive.

My girlfriend recently discovered that professional contacts here in a foreign
country could look her up on F'book from behind their desks and see pictures
from her college days during their meeting.

Should she have turned her photos private earlier on? YES

Did Facebook give her any indication they were so open? NO. In fact Facebook
changed their settings numerous times and each time left different defaults.

Now she had to go through and make numerous settings changes, and each time
she didn't really know how things looked to a non-friend logged into Facebook.

Ultimately I think she had to manually make EVERY album private to friends
only.

Seriously if I wasn't so locked into Facebook I would be so out of there.
Bastards have really abused our trust.

------
andrewcross
It's completely up to the developers here. You have to know that you are
breaking the trust of your users for a spike in traffic.

As an example, I no longer use Socialcam or Viddy after they defaulted to
"frictionless sharing". They got a really nice spike from it, but it cost them
my trust.

------
coopdog
Hell yes, stay off the wall.

That's the reason most people don't use Facebook login, they're scared it will
put something on their wall.

If Facebook had any sense they'd force the API to ask permission and show the
user what will be posted before it will do so. Maybe then people would be more
likely to use Facebook login and give them that network effect advantage
they're after.

~~~
slig
> That's the reason most people don't use Facebook login, they're scared it
> will put something on their wall.

You and your tech savvy friends are not "most people". Most people don't know
and don't care.

~~~
smoyer
But they do care when they're wall contains things they didn't plan to share.
Curiously, I've seen this a lot with G+ and Picasa.

------
trustfundbaby
It isn't accidental, Facebook chooses defaults that work for facebook ... not
for the user. This causes people not to trust facebook, and because of that
they're going to find it more and more difficult to monetize user behavior on
the site.

They've been trying to sell users on sharing everything, but people want to
share things on their own terms. Google _understood_ (hopefully they still do)
this, facebook doesn't.

How can they do really great things with user data when the default attitude
of their users is "I don't trust them with my data"? ... its a trick question
... they can't.

There's a reason why they say "You can shear a sheep many times, but you can
only skin it once".

Will be fun to watch them try though.

------
phwd
This is partly the fault of the user (yes, there is a dialog that says what
exactly is going to happen, so the ignorance is there no matter how much you
think the user is clueless) and mostly the fault of Facebook partners.
Facebook partners and web companies with close relationships with Facebook get
access to the Open Graph actions first (Spotify was in this group).

Thus, less experienced developers and lesser known companies follow the path
these companies take and believe that this is how the Open Graph should be.
There are many questions on Stack Overflow or the Facebook developers group
from people inexperienced asking how to make articles automatically read when
users arrive at their site (the news.read action).

~~~
andrewcross
It says that they are requesting the ability to share to your wall, yes, but
most of our previous experiences have taught us that this means we will have
an OPTION to do that in the app, not that it will do it automatically without
you ever knowing.

------
brokentone
Agree with the message of the article, but I feel as though it's a little out
of date. Frictionless sharing isn't new, Facebook isn't "entering" this issue.

------
yuhong
Personally, I have been thinking that the illusion that people are perfect is
flawed for a while now.

------
mtgx
Maybe this is the only way Mark Zuckerberg can keep his "Zuck Law" alive
(sharing doubling every year), by forcing everyone's accounts to share more
and more.

