

Facebook and “radical transparency” - v0xel
http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/2010/05/14/facebook-and-radical-transparency-a-rant.html

======
raganwald
\+ a bushelful for pointing out that Facebook's UI is deliberately
disingenuous: It encourages people to share information while carefully
obscuring how widely that information is being shared.

Do people who share their status with "everyone" really understand that their
entire history of updates are being scraped and aggregated by "partners," or
do they think that it's only being read by people who happen to search for
them personally?

As the author puts it, it's a case of a lack of informed consent. And that is
unethical.

~~~
natrius
How could they possibly explain all of the implications of "everyone" that
people might be worried about? It says _everyone_. If there's something you
don't want every single person on the face of the planet to be able to read,
don't set things to "everyone".

I don't think the problem is people underestimating friends of friends. It's
not knowing when they're sharing with everyone. Instead of having to click a
button below the status box to see who you're going to be sharing with, the
current setting should be displayed on the button itself so it's always
visible.

~~~
raganwald
I think the expression "informed consent" is the crux. If a doctor is
discussing a procedure with you and they say, "there are certain risks," it is
not enough that they tell you, they must make sure you actually understand the
implications well enough to make a reasonable decision.

Informed consent is a much higher standard than simple "consent."

The argument here is that while Facebook may technically be telling you
everything you need to know, they aren't actually achieving informed consent.
If you mistakenly think "everyone" means everyone who uses Facebook
personally, you haven't given them informed consent to share your information
with a credit bureau.

~~~
natrius
I think the doctor comparison is apt. You're basically asking for Facebook to
give the sort of fine print that gets read quickly at the end of
pharmaceutical ads. Barely anyone would accept the new default if you said:

 _Possible side effects of this setting include: Getting fired for your
political beliefs, inability to get a loan due to a status update that
indicated financial irresponsibility, and a speedy end to any political
campaign you attempt to start._

This seems like a pretty big double standard. Twitter is public by default,
but no one is setting the same bar for informed consent. The issue isn't the
change from private to public; I think most people who accept that default
understand that their posts are no longer private by default. I don't see why
explaining more is necessary.

This privacy change happened in December, by the way. If it weren't for
Instant Personalization, this firestorm never would've happened.

~~~
raganwald
> I don't see why explaining more is necessary.

perhaps you and I should get clear on the word _necessary_. Here's a thought
experiment: Imagine we poll some statistically significant number of users and
ask them questions about their own settings like "Can your mother see this? Do
you think you could be denied a job if you were to post this?" and so forth.

One possibility is that the vast majority of the people would get the answers
right. They understand the implications and are happy with their choices. The
other possibility is that some large number of respondents don't get the
answers right, indicating that they don't understand the implications.

The standard I feel is appropriate for all companies trafficking in
information with such serious potential outcomes is that their customers
understand the implications of their choices.

How much explaining is necessary? I say enough to achieve understanding. It's
flat-out unethical to conduct a business where a substantial proportion of
your 'customers' do not understand the implications of doing business with
you.

Of course, the plural of anecdote is not "data." Maybe the OP has it wrong and
most Facebook users understand what choices they are making and simply don't
value their privacy as much as outraged nerds on a forum.

I'm not saying it's wrong for Facebook to share people's data with "everyone,"
only pointing out that IMO it would be unethical to do so _if_ a significant
proportion of their users did not give their informed consent.

~~~
natrius
I agree wholeheartedly.

------
ggchappell
2 passages to note:

> Youth are actually much more concerned about exposure than adults these
> days. Why? Probably because they get it. And it’s why they’re using fake
> names ....

Well, I'm glad they're concerned. However, there's getting it, and then
there's getting it.

I'm definitely on the adult end of things (I'm 44). I tended to use made-up
names in net discussions until relatively recently. But I consistently found
myself tempted to make comments that I would not want my real identity to be
associated with. So, when I got my HN account in early '09, I used an
abbreviation of my real name, as a reminder to myself that I shouldn't say
anything I would not want to be associated with (and also that there is a good
chance that even "anonymous" comments could be traced to the real me someday).

And that seems to me (in my arrogance?) to be a rather deeper level of
"getting it" than that attained by many of the above-mentioned youth using
fake names.

> Over and over again, I find that people’s mental model of who can see what
> doesn’t match up with reality.

Definitely. And this is not a new phenomenon at all. I remember reading the
Usenet group misc.kids back in the 90s, and being shocked at all the personal
details of children's lives that some parents were posting, often under
apparently real names. The newsgroup was being treated as a neighborhood
mothers gossip group, not as something that the whole world could see, and
that would be archived forever.

EDIT. And a third passage:

> The battle that is underway is not a battle over the future of privacy and
> publicity. It’s a battle over choice and informed consent.

An excellent point, and one that needs to be made more often. Despite what the
article says, the statement "young people don't care about privacy" might
indeed be true, in general. However, even if it is, that does not mean it is
okay to make privacy-related decisions for them. And it certainly does not
mean it is okay to invade their privacy by means of trickery and deceit.

------
derefr
> When people think “friends-of-friends” they don’t think about all of the
> types of people that their friends might link to; they think of the people
> that their friends would bring to a dinner party if they were to host it.

Could the second category be realized as an algorithm/interface-aspect?
Because, basically, this is what Facebook comes down to: "I want to share
things with people I have determined will be nice to me, and people that those
people have also determined _will be nice to me_." Note that the second clause
isn't "will be nice to _them_." If A trusts B, and B trusts C, but A hates C
_and B knows that_ , then the ideal social network would somehow encode that.

Right now, all I can imagine in an O(n^2) operation where, every time you make
a friend, you mark a subset of your friends as their peripheral friends.
There's gotta be a better way than that.

------
kixxauth
I have truly enjoyed watching Facebook and Zuck get called out by mainstream
media and members of congress. It's not just the geeks who care anymore. T -5
days until my account is deleted.

<http://www.google.com/trends?q=delete+facebook+account>

~~~
zbanks
Well...

[http://www.google.com/trends?q=delete+facebook+account,+face...](http://www.google.com/trends?q=delete+facebook+account,+facebook+account&ctab=0&geo=all&date=all&sort=1)

This seems to suggest that _fewer_ people are searching to delete their
account, proportional to the number of people using facebook.

------
philk
_You have one identity. The days of you having a different image for your work
friends or co-workers and for the other people you know are probably coming to
an end pretty quickly. Having two identities for yourself is an example of a
lack of integrity. --Zuckerberg, 2009_

Zuckerberg has no business discussing "a lack of integrity" other than his
own.

------
docgnome
> The psychological harm can be great. Just think of how many “heros” have
> killed themselves following the high levels of publicity they received.

This comment seem a little over the top to me, but all in all, as someone who
has used Facebook for a grand total of an hour over a year ago, I found it to
be a very interesting article.

------
lvecsey
I think people try to use his age against him. But too bad. It's his company
and let him run it the way he wants.

Particularly if it goes against the old, ingrained ways of thinking I'm all
the more for it.

~~~
andywood
I like this comment. When I was younger, I used to think a whole lot more
about all the different ways that things could be. As I got older, I very
slowly realized just how immovable most of the rest of society is. Gradually,
I came to accept the way people are as "reality", which I found necessary to
do in order to make a living and have friends. But I think in some ways I had
a much larger perspective when I was younger.

------
alanh
Read the whole post. Danah Boyd always writes very insightfully about social
networks and their real-world users and implications. She delivers again here.

------
doron
I had a facebook account for a good while, was lazy enough to have used it to
authenticate to this very site. I was always somewhat troubled by the way the
site privacy system morphed overtime, but it served a great utility for me
especially in my social event management, so I let sleeping dogs lie.

As I investigated it more (admittedly since social graph announcement and
other developments of late ) I decided to remove my account.

My decision was based in part due the fact that I have friends and colleagues
who do not enjoy the relative safety both political, and social, that I enjoy
as an educated white American citizen of heterosexual persuasion. In a sense I
feel that it is irresponsible of me to possibly "out" a friend by accident
just because it is a non issue for me.

I find the statements attributed to Zuckerberg profoundly distressing and
ignorant of the world we live in, you don't have to go far to find people who
maintain different identities so they can merely survive. it is a lack of
intellectual integrity on his part.

~~~
philwelch
I don't think Zuckerberg--or the idea of transparency--is as naive or ignorant
as you point it. It may ultimately be a bad idea but for deeper reasons than
"they never thought of people with unusual lifestyles who may be oppressed
because of them".

Here's the argument: people keep secrets because people keep secrets. Those of
us who have different sexual orientations and make other non-traditional
lifestyle choices keep it secret because it's socially taboo, but it's
socially taboo only because we continue keeping it secret. We'd be better off
if that was broken down, but you don't want to be the _first_ one coming out
of the closet. Thanks to game theory we're all worse off. That's why you need
to change the game. 20 years ago you'd be shocked to find that your uncle was
in a gay polyamorous relationship. The idea is to build a world where you
won't care because you'll know two dozen gay people and two dozen polyamorous
people.

~~~
doron
The idea of transparency resonates with me, but to attribute a lack character
to people who do not live and have the opportunity the Mr Zuckerberg enjoys is
something i find abhorrent.

Transparency starts at home, Facebook is not a transparent organization, if
his ideals call for it, he should be the first in line, and his business
should tag along. his case would look better if he led by example.

------
natrius
_"...Zuckerberg believes that people will be better off if they make
themselves transparent. Not only that, society will be better off."_

I happen to agree with this. Most of the thoughts that people share with each
other are completely harmless. Allowing those to be visible by everyone helps
us to learn more about ourselves and our society. It's a good default as long
as people are aware of what they're doing. Even if people realize what their
default settings are (which I think most people understood when they were
being set but might have forgotten), there should be a visible reminder of who
you're sharing with to minimize mistakes.

We currently live in a private-by-default society, and changing that would be
a good thing.

~~~
kareemm
> We currently live in a private-by-default society, and changing that would
> be a good thing.

To what? A public-by-default?

Do you tell your parents about your sex life?

Or share your health updates with your co-workers?

Or something more innocuous - do you tell your friends how much money you
make?

Even if you answered yes to these questions, recognize that the decision to
share that information belongs to the individual, not anybody else.

~~~
philwelch
Privacy is kind of an arbitrary culture-dependent thing, which means
(optimistically) that we can and should rationally evaluate what kind of
culture we want to live in and work towards it.

Personally I only keep things private for two reasons:

1\. I am ashamed of them. I would like to keep private when I make a mistake
or lose emotional control. This is just vanity and it's small of me to want to
keep these things private.

2\. For the courtesy of others. People don't want to hear about my sex life so
I don't tell them. People don't want to see my naked body so I wear clothes.
That's related to privacy but different because the issue is letting people
filter the information they consume, not the information they publish, and
privacy is more about letting people filter the information they publish.

~~~
neilk
You're confusing privacy with propriety.

Privacy is more than just avoiding embarrassment; it's about control over how
our own information is used.

Consider a simple case -- people don't want information about all their
movements available to everyone. Stalkers, ex-spouses, business competitors,
or paranoid acquaintances. We're not talking here about concealing any
shameful acts, just quotidian activities.

Also consider how Facebook allows users to authoritatively link a person to an
event, by tagging them in a photo. So whether the subject might want it or
not, that leaves a trail for others to follow. If they don't follow their
Facebook account closely, they may never even know it's happening.

You may be interested in the excellent paper "'I've Got Nothing To Hide', and
Other Misunderstandings of Privacy", by Daniel J. Solove.

<http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=998565>

~~~
philwelch
That's a nice unexamined assumption: "our own information". Not only do you
have the idea that you can own information, but you come to "own" information
merely by the fact that the information itself concerns you.

Next, "people don't _want_ information about their movements to be publicly
available". The question isn't what people want, but what people are
_entitled_ to.

I understand the legitimate use of secrecy (in the short term) to, for
instance, hide one's suspicious-but-innocuous (or illegal-but-harmless)
activities from the government. But even in the long term, let's imagine that
every stoner in the United States has undeniable proof of their ongoing
possession and use of marijuana made public. What's more likely to happen--
that the DEA will swoop in to arrest _all_ of them or society will realize
that would be silly and hypocritical? Getting from the status quo to that
point is just a question of game theory, and whether those with power will be
just as exposed as those without power. Hard problems, sure, but the old
bargain (we'll keep secrets and let you keep yours) is due for renegotiation.

~~~
neilk
Using "own" doesn't always imply ownership. Consider: "my own barber", "my own
mother", "my own congressperson". It just means "the X that pertains to my
life".

And you're still making the mistake of thinking that the only reason you would
want information to be private is because you're ashamed of it. As the paper I
referred you to notes, there are other, non-secret, non-shaming information
that we don't want to be easily accessible by others.

Also, wanting control doesn't imply that the person wants to falsify or hide
information. Consider how hard it is to get rid of mistakes on one's credit
record.

