

Is Facebook unethical, clueless or unlucky? - flapjack
http://calacanis.com/2009/12/13/is-facebook-unethical-clueless-or-unlucky/

======
bonaldi
I think the only reason this hasn't become a monster shitstorm is because the
vast majority of users don't realise how their page looks to people who aren't
their friends, and don't yet know how exposed they are.

It's also hard to spot the changes to profile picture settings unless you
notice that in search results you can now click on the profile picture: the
page otherwise looks identical to how it did before, when you couldn't.

I was bitten by this, and consider myself fairly savvy. I carefully read the
entire new settings roadblock, and made sure all of my old settings were kept.
Nonetheless, a day or two later I double-checked, and after drilling down four
levels, discovered that all of my profile pictures were set to "friends of
friends", which is massively too loose.

Facebook wants to open up, but has it forgotten that it only became the size
it did because it was the first place on the web that older and
untechnologically savvy people felt they could trust with their personal
pictures and data?

They break that trust at their -- and our -- peril. People burnt by the
exposure of pictures they thought only a private and vetted list of people
could see will be very wary of trusting any of the services some of us are
trying to build.

~~~
indigoviolet
Actually, I believe album privacy was not affected by this change at all.

Go here :
[http://www.facebook.com/settings/?tab=privacy&section=pr...](http://www.facebook.com/settings/?tab=privacy&section=profile)
\- notice there's a separate setting for Photo Albums. That (the album
privacy) interface has existed for at least a year. Your profile photos should
be an album under there.

Photos /of/ you, where you've been tagged is a separate setting that is called
out on that page, which I believe was in the recent privacy changes dialog.

A further confusion is that the current Profile picture is publicly available
information, as per the recent changes.

This was definitely poorly communicated in the changes dialog; hopefully these
things will get better in further iterations.

You can click on the 'Preview as' button to see your profile as it will appear
to another user.

------
indigoviolet
I don't get it. (caveat/disclaimer, I work at Facebook, and this is entirely
and completely my opinion only. I did not work on the privacy settings
project).

The process was as far as I can tell, _completely_ upfront. No dishonest
changes were made. There has been considerable prior notice, huge amounts of
press; the interface forced you to look at it and make your own choice, every
reasonable privacy setting was made possible.

The default selection was based on users' previous settings where things
mapped cleanly, and where they didn't/where it made sense, the recommendation
the site made was to make more things public- because Facebook believes that's
the best way to provide utility to the user. Which isn't outrageous- there are
obvious features that would be bettered and enabled by having more sharing in
the system.

Why is it deceitful/duping users then? Are you claiming that every
software/website that shows you a EULA is cheating you into using the service?

This whole argument is based on the prejudice that (a) Facebook is out to be
dishonest with their sharing practices (b) users are dumb (c) the best way to
use the internet is to batten down the hatches and live in a bunker. I
disagree with all of these.

~~~
sounddust
The process was misleading. The default selection was based on users' previous
settings _only if they had changed them in the past_ , and as Facebook has
pointed out, only 20% of people have done so. That forces the rest of users to
make a choice that most neither understand nor want to make.

People see Facebook as a way to privately share their life with friends.
That's the foundation on which Facebook was built - that's the core aspect
that convinced people to abandon other social networks for FB - and now they
are idiotically abandoning that core principal and needlessly exposing their
users.

Personally, as a web app developer, I'm confused about the process myself. The
privacy dialog seemed to suggest that no matter what my settings are, my name,
profile picture, and friends list will be public to all. If I'm being given
more choice about my privacy, why is this choice being taken away from me?
Until this point, I had the choice of being pretty much invisible from anyone
but my friends.

Back when people used Myspace, it was quite open by default as well. The
difference is that on Myspace your name could be Donald Duck, your location
could be set to Antarctica and nobody cared. You could invent your own privacy
controls where they didn't exist. Try doing something that on Facebook and
your account will be instantly suspended.

This is not about users being dumb or not. Many intelligent people don't know
(or care to know) the intricate details of web apps.

~~~
indigoviolet
Time will prove you right or wrong, but I believe that people will in general
adapt to the way the web changes. I think it's a challenge to educate users so
that you can have a featureful app without causing them harm, but I don't
think it's impossible. The web populace has grown vastly more informed in just
the last five years- why should we decide they won't be able to grasp this
extra control?

Facebook is ambitious; it wants to be a lot of things. It wants to continue to
be the service where you talk only to your friends, but it also wants to be
other things. We believe we can do other things as well as we've done friend-
only social networking. That may be a misjudgement, we'll find out.

Re: your friend list: <http://blog.facebook.com/blog.php?post=197943902130>

Re: The other settings that became publicly available- I think it was a call
they made, balancing what is good for the network and what is reasonable for
the individual on a social networking site. Some of it had to do with what
privacy was feasible to enforce (given that you had to have Search on the
site, and different levels of indexing etc), and I don't necessarily know all
the details here.

The primary goal was to /simplify/ privacy settings, and make it more fine-
grained, which they've clearly done.

~~~
gaius
_The other settings that became publicly available- I think it was a call they
made, balancing what is good for the network and what is reasonable for the
individual on a social networking site._

Who your friends are and what groups you are a member of is potentially
consequential information. This was the fatal flaw in Livejournal's privacy
system. Sure you could make your journal entries friends-only but your profile
- your friends list, your interests, your groups and your profile pictures -
were always public. If you were involved in anything that you maybe didn't
want your current/future employer/cow-orkers (say) to know about, the ONLY
safeguard was to keep your username a secret. Well on Facebook, you're
supposed to use your real name...

------
tokenadult
"Perhaps I’m being hyperbolic (who me?), or maybe they are a little of both,
but the fact remains they screw up on important issues almost as if it’s a
'best practice' to do so."

That's how it is beginning to look to me, like Facebook has INSTINCTS that
guide it to make the most sleazy or annoying changes it can.

~~~
johnl
Those "instincts" are looking like someone's ego dominating over everyone else
in the company. Are they going to turn Facebook into a really big "reverse
catalog" company. By that I mean instead of grouping goods into a catalog and
sending to one person, you send one good to a lot of people (via Facebook)
with the added requirement that the good in question matches with the
"preferences" of the Facebook person? Would be interesting to see if that
works.

------
dhimes
_If we don’t behave well then we are going to get regulated by clueless
politicians and policy makers._

Wise words indeed. And when it happens, entrepreneurs everywhere will be
crying.

~~~
sili
As a side note, he raises an interesting question that has been floating in my
head for a while. Two hundred years ago, politicians were the most educated
and informed people around. We could rely on them to make good informed
decisions. But with the explosion of information and ever-accelerating
development in technology and therefore our every aspect of our lives, it
seems politicians are reduced to the common denominator knowledge and
understanding and quality of their decisions is less and less sufficient to
lead a country.

~~~
DrJokepu
[citation needed] - seriously though, I'm struggling to believe that
politicians used to be any more competent a couple of hunderds of years ago.
It's just that the incompetent ones aren't remembered. The United States had
it's fair share of incompetent presidents in the 1850s for example.

~~~
chrischen
It could be based off the same argument for why there are less polymaths now,
and that's simply because we know too much. Politicians need to know more to
achieve the same level of well-roundedness as they did in say, the 1700s.

~~~
anamax
He's claiming that politicians were better informed than the rest of us in the
past, not that they were informed enough in the past.

~~~
chrischen
So politicians in the past were more informed because they had an easier time
informing themselves. Those capable of being more well-rounded may have found
politics to be a better fit since it was still manageable at that time. But
now with more advancements in every specific area, it's harder to be well-
rounded and perfectly up-to-date. So politicians nowadays cannot keep up and
become more educated on issues because it requires more effort to thoroughly
understand diverse topics. Is that what he meant?

~~~
anamax
> So politicians in the past were more informed because they had an easier
> time informing themselves.

"Easier" isn't enough - they had to have it easier than other people.

> Those capable of being more well-rounded may have found politics to be a
> better fit since it was still manageable at that time.

"may"?

How about some evidence (either way)?

~~~
chrischen
My point was that back then it was probably easier to be more generally
educated to a useful degree relative to the general population. So the elite
would have occupied the political positions while still being able to maintain
a useful degree of general knowledgeness (forgive the made up word), whereas
now it doesn't matter who goes into politics because he/she will have a hard
time because it's so much harder to be knowledgeable about everything to the
same useful degree as they did back then.

My original point was that this doesn't need evidence because it can be
reasoned out. But I guess that depends if my reasoning is faulty or not.

~~~
anamax
> My point was that back then it was probably easier to be more generally
> educated to a useful degree relative to the general population.

That's not the same as "So politicians in the past were more informed because
they had an easier time informing themselves." let alone "Those capable of
being more well-rounded may have found politics to be a better fit since it
was still manageable at that time."

However, they do share common theme - you think that they favored those in
political positions or the reverse more than they do now.

> My original point was that this doesn't need evidence because it can be
> reasoned out.

You're making claims about the relative ease of being a 1700s well informed
farrier and 1700s politician and the relative ease of being a w2000s ell
informed programmer and 2000s politician. How can those claims be evaluated
without evidence?

~~~
chrischen
"So politicians in the past were more informed because they had an easier time
informing themselves."

I didn't mean that they were, quantitively speaking, more informed than they
are now. I assumed it to be relative to the general population.

"Those capable of being more well-rounded may have found politics to be a
better fit since it was still manageable at that time."

This is simply a related hypothesis to the selection of politicians back then
based on the postulate that it was easier to be educated to a useful degree
relative to the general population.

You're right, they can't be evaluated to an absolute, or even close certainty,
without the necessary facts. But you can still come up with a hypothesis
sufficiently close through deduction from facts we can both agree on. I was
suggesting the latter for my argument.

Anyways I find this argument quite pointless. If you could do me a favor,
let's stop discussing it.

~~~
anamax
> This is simply a related hypothesis to the selection of politicians back
> then based on the postulate that it was easier to be educated to a useful
> degree relative to the general population.

Even if it was (and I see no reason to believe that it was or wasn't), it
doesn't necessarily follow that politicians then would have availed themselves
of it more than they do now.

> Anyways I find this argument quite pointless.

My apologies. I thought that you made those claims because you found them
interesting, which surely includes whether or not they're true.

------
apinstein
Actually, it might be worse than the article says.

TFA says that it only changes your settings once you click through... but I
have been getting new "friend requests" from people I have never heard of this
weekend (since the change went into effect), I think because my profile and
various other info had already been made public.

Facebook's entire thing (IMO) was that it was a safe and private way to share
stuff between friends.

What they've just done violated all of the brand equity I had in them, and I
am seriously considering shutting off my account. I have already maxed out the
privacy settings.

It's this type of crap that causes a promising idea like Facebook to turn into
a has-been in a matter of years because of mass flight of users.

~~~
indigoviolet
" TFA says that it only changes your settings once you click through... but I
have been getting new "friend requests" from people I have never heard of this
weekend (since the change went into effect), I think because my profile and
various other info had already been made public. "

That is highly unlikely, and if so, it's a bug (and you should report it). The
code looks up your privacy settings at display time, it doesn't make some
sweeping database change.

------
kyro
So, my experience was the complete opposite to his. Had Facebook not forced me
to view my privacy settings, I probably never would have. The settings they
suggested were quite conservative and I definitely didn't feel as if they were
trying to trick me into picking any particular privacy preference. At the end
of it, I was actually appreciative of them.

How else would you have handled it? I think the way they dealt with it was the
most upfront way. They couldn't have been more straightforward. It was in your
face, and if you're the one who decided to skip over the privacy options they
were making ridiculously accessible, then it's your fault.

~~~
wglb
Er, not for me. everything was going to be totally public unless i went
through and reset them to where I wanted to. And you have to dig in a non-
obvious place for photo privacy settings.

I agree with TFA.

~~~
viraptor
Apparently not all users had the same default choices... I don't know what the
reason was (A/B testing? trying to get unbiased statistics?), but my
girlfriend had all the default choices in the right column (leave the old
behaviour), while I got the defaults on the left (new behaviour - "friends of
friends" and "everyone").

------
paul
In addition to being somewhat trollish, this article is inaccurate. The change
doesn't make everything public -- the settings vary by type of info and also I
think it tries to preserve customizations (I'm not completely sure how that
aspect works, but different people get different defaults as I understand it).
A quick search turned up this screen-shot:
[http://images.smh.com.au/2009/12/10/960612/420-facebook-
priv...](http://images.smh.com.au/2009/12/10/960612/420-facebook-
privacy-420x0.jpg)

Also, I'm pretty sure his "search" theory is mostly nonsense. From what I can
tell, the change is driven by a genuine belief that these settings provide
greater utility for users. This has certainly been my experience sharing on
FriendFeed (which is more public) vs sharing on Facebook, so I tend to think
it's correct.

~~~
ivankirigin
Indeed. Evidence shows that users understood the changes - 50% of users select
something besides the defaults, and Facebook has been open with those numbers.
This is after millions of users in countries like Turkey already had
effectively public profiles.

    
    
      An average user, certainly, has no idea what is going on by these changes.
    

He ignored the public stats in order to make a point.

Further, this change is important, and there was a lot of work and testing to
make sure people understood the results. Jason assumes his intuition about
what users understand is more accurate than this research.

In other words, he doesn't know what he's talking about.

~~~
zmimon
50% of users selecting something other than defaults tells me that Facebook
_did_ act against the vast majority of it's users wishes and choose default
settings that were not appropriate. Considering a substantial percentage would
have just clicked through you probably have 2/3 of people NOT wanting the
changes they made. How is that ethical?

~~~
gloob
Calling "suggesting a change and asking users up front to confirm or correct
it" unethical strikes me as sensationalistic. The fact that a large percentage
of users didn't just click through the thing (i.e. it wasn't some stealth
decision forced on users) doesn't make it less ethical - if anything, it makes
it more so.

~~~
jkincaid
I don't know if unethical is the right word. Maybe "shady" would be better?

If Facebook wanted to stay on the safe side of things, they'd have kept the
default as the more private setting and then show some kind of prompt saying
"Hey, this is a new Everyone setting. This is what it does. Would you like to
try it?"

------
chris123
Zucker, Facebook, and Facebook’s investors have shown their true greedy colors
all along. The initial big tell was Beacon:
[http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/11/07/the-facebook-ad-
backlas...](http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/11/07/the-facebook-ad-backlash-
begins/). The most recent (before last week) was Scamville:
[http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/10/31/scamville-the-social-
ga...](http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/10/31/scamville-the-social-gaming-
ecosystem-of-hell/). And now this.

~~~
kristiandupont
They are a business. Some of their actions might be unethical, but the term
"greedy" doesn't really mean anything when you are talking about a business.

------
malloreon
From what I've read, the new updates default to share with "everyone" only if
you have NOT modified your privacy settings in the past.

If you have, which probably anyone concerned with privacy has, they default to
"not everyone" choice.

The rest of the point stands - people use facebook to keep in touch with their
friends. They're not interested in content propogation to strangers.

~~~
patio11
_If you have, which probably anyone concerned with privacy has, they default
to "not everyone" choice._

I had not read about this, signed in last night to get a message from my
sister-in-law about Secret Santa arrangements for this year, and got hit with
the prompt. It defaulted me to everything being public. I don't know whether I
count as "anybody concerned with privacy" or not, but my understanding on
Facebook has always been that when you Google for my business you do NOT see
how long it has been since I broke up with my girlfriend. The fact that that
would have changed if I was not extremely thorough at clicking my way through
their roadblock was upsetting to me.

~~~
indigoviolet
That is why there was a roadblock and a ton of information about the changes.
No piece of software can help you if you're willfully ignorant.

------
netcan
I think I understand what they are trying to do, & it is not all that bad. The
implementation is just a bit sleazy. For social networks (especially upstart
little ones), one of the best traffic sources will probably be your members
getting Googled.

If you are active on half a dozen sites & you Google your name, Facebook
doesn't tend to do too well.

Apart from that there is also chatter of various sorts that may drive some
search engine traffic & perhaps some Twitter-like real time stuff.

It must be frustrating that with all the long tail relevance of the site, they
are letting all this traffic go by.

But I think Jason is right, this is sleazy.

------
ojbyrne
I'm not convinced that it was the "Golden Child" who instigated the change,
and that the "adult supervision" failed to stand up and object. My impression
of dotcom execs is they're generally more rapacious, unethical and greedy than
any founder.

------
marltod
Traffic per user is decreasing that is why you are seeing moves like this to
boost traffic. Their business model relies on traffic per user going up not
down. They will continue to do immoral things like this until they go all out
and change the terms of service and sell all your data to advertisers.

------
misuba
I went through the same process as Calacanis and most of my content had been
automatically set to Friends Only. Maybe it's Calacanis who's unlucky... or
clueless, or et cetera.

~~~
megaduck
Most, but not all. When I went through, there was only one option up at the
top that was not set to "Friends Only". No big deal, right? Just one thing out
of 10 or so?

Except that one thing included all my status updates, links, and pictures. I
switched it off because I'd heard all the hoopla and knew to read carefully.

Calacanis is totally correct. Many (most?) people will just see that it's
"only one thing" and assume that Facebook picked sensible defaults. I would
have, if I hadn't been warned ahead of time.

~~~
zmimon
> Most, but not all. When I went through, there was only one option up at the
> top that was not set to "Friends Only"

I'm staring at the screen in question right now. I hate Facebook and have set
it to not let anybody see anything in the past. NOW THE DEFAULTS FOR ALL THE
TOP ITEMS ARE SET TO SHARE WITH EVERYONE. ie. Family and Relationships, Work
and Education, Posts I Create (includes photos, etc.) and About Me are all set
to share with everyone.

I find it disgusting.

~~~
pvg
At those levels of disappointment, the settings page you probably want is:
[http://www.facebook.com/help/contact.php?show_form=delete_ac...](http://www.facebook.com/help/contact.php?show_form=delete_account)

------
IsaacL
_So why is Facebook trying to trick their users?

Simple: search results.

Facebook is trying to dupe hundreds of millions of users they’ve spent years
attracting into exposing their data for Facebook’s personal gain: pageviews.
Yes, Facebook is tricking us into exposing all our items so that those
personal items get indexed in search engines–including Facebook’s–in order to
drive more traffic to Facebook._

I would say that Facebook doesn't really care about attracting traffic through
natural SEO. It's not like people are going to sign up because they found a
random Facebook profile when searching for something else. There are a lot of
obvious benefits to FB if users are more open about its details, but it seems
like the author of this article hasn't actually thought about what they
actually are. Less politely, he's just a troll.

 _Facebook has had a couple of innovations in their history, like their
application layer and news feed (which is now gone), but for the past couple
of years they’ve given up on innovation and focused on stealing ideas from
Twitter and out-executing them, while not caring about user rights._

How many ideas _can_ you steal from Twitter? Focusing more on status updates
is about it.

------
mark_l_watson
The popup dialog box was fine. It would have been better though to have more
of the defaults tuned to more privacy enhancing options.

Facebook is cool, though, and I check my home page a couple of times a week.
That said, Facebook is more interesting as an application delivery platform,
and their third party developer support seems to be pretty good.

------
prateekdayal
Facebook's address book importer is no better - This is not the first time
Facebook has done something like this (as the original email points out. I
have been personally duped by facebook's address book importer before and have
blogged about my experience here -

[http://www.prateekdayal.net/2009/07/18/beware-of-facebook-
ad...](http://www.prateekdayal.net/2009/07/18/beware-of-facebook-address-book-
importer/)

------
cmelbye
Seriously? You'd think that they would learn after the Beacon ordeal (easily
the event with the most negative publicity in Facebook's history.)

------
friendstock
agreed. most users assume Facebook content is (somewhat) private

------
jsz0
Hasn't anyone noticed that many Facebook users will friend _everyone_ and
_anyone_ who asks? This suggests to me that they either do not care about
privacy much or, more likely, don't use Facebook status updates for intensely
private information.

~~~
manbearpig
No. The people who friend everybody are not real Facebook users. They are
generally older people, already out of college/grad school who are unable to
build a true network of acquaintances on Facebook and are just on Facebook to
feel as though they are participating in social networking. Twitter is a more
suitable option for these people because it doesn't require any genuine social
interaction. Real Facebook users have hundreds of photos and thousands of wall
posts accumulated throughout the years (of college). For them a Facebook
account is actually an online profile of their actual lives. Most will want to
keep this private.

And nobody cares about status updates. They're generally just an inane
sentence about whatever you're doing. But isn't that all Twitter is? YES!
Twitter's entire function is just a minor feature on Facebook. But remember,
Twitter's purpose is to allow old people who can't make a real social network
to delude themselves into think that they're on the cutting edge of
technology.

~~~
gaius
You see this a lot in the mainstream press, some journo saying "what's the
point of competing to see who has the most friends" or "who cares what some
random people are up to" whereas in reality, no-one who is what you call a
real user even thinks like this.

It is also true however that FB wants to cater to that group as well.

------
garply
I'm a little unclear - I just logged in today and reverted everything to how
it used to be (I think). Were the new settings active before I logged in?
I.e., did I have publicly exposed info while I was away?

------
chanux
I’m sorry, what the frack just happened? I turned over my friend list,photos
and status updates to everyone in the world? Why on earth would anyone do that
with their Facebook page?

Facebook is a Twitter wannabe, That's why.

------
andrewtj
To butcher Hanlon's razor - "Never attribute to malice that which can be
adequately explained by bugs".

~~~
andrewtj
There's more than a few accounts of a poor mapping between old and new privacy
settings (mine weren't what I'd imagine FB would have picked given I had
extremely conservative settings). It seems most folks think there's no problem
or that they're evil. I happen to think they just botched it - is that not
succinctly conveyed in my comment?

------
steveklabnik
"I’m sorry, what the frack just happened? I turned over my friend list, photos
and status updates to everyone in the world? Why on earth would anyone do that
with their Facebook page?

The entire purpose of Facebook since inception has been to share your
information with a small group of people in your private network."

I don't know, maybe it's just me: I've always assumed that anything that I put
on the Internet will be known to anyone. I've never turned on any of these
privacy settings, and I'm pretty okay with that.

I can see why others may want to. But I don't.

Maybe I've been on Twitter for too long.

~~~
richardw
I put my mail on the internet (in gmail) and I'd prefer it stayed private.

~~~
steveklabnik
Do you PGP sign and encrypt it all? Because otherwise, it's pretty public.

------
mattmaroon
No.

~~~
astrec
As your comment here is generally well informed I'd be chuffed if you
elaborated.

edit: genuine compliment, but i'm not crawling.

~~~
mattmaroon
It was mostly a play on the title that I found humorous, since it clearly
meant to imply they were one or the other but you could negate both with one
word.

But I do truly believe that Facebook is neither too.

------
pwnstigator
I resent Zuckerberg. He got extremely lucky and is massively overrated. I
wouldn't be upset if he were just a millionaire a few hundred times over; who
cares about that? But he certainly doesn't deserve to be the most successful
member of our generation, and hopefully someone will eclipse him in that
regard.

Facebook has some exceptionally good programmers, due to its financial
fortune, but the mediocrity of vision and hubris at the helm persist. Facebook
has some great technologists, but the leadership couldn't make a good decision
to save their lives. Luckily for them; to this point, they've never needed to.

