

In Defense of Facebook - elleferrer
http://mashable.com/2010/05/16/in-defense-of-facebook/

======
ElbertF
"[..] if you didn’t want your pictures shared with the rest of the world, you
shouldn’t upload them in the first place."

Why can't we expect services like Facebook to keep our private stuff private?
Facebook was always about sharing stuff with friends and not the world. I
agree it's smart to keep personal things off the web but I wonder if this guy
would stand by his opinion if Gmail started publishing his e-mails.

~~~
Mystalic
Thanks for the response to my article, Elbert.

The difference between E-mail and Facebook is that email isn't designed to be
social (aka it isn't designed to spread information to masses of people
quickly), while Facebook is.

However, I still don't upload pictures I'm not going to be proud of, even if
it's just for an email to someone. Once it's sent to someone else, I assume
that it could leak to the web in any number of ways.

Perhaps that line was too harsh, but the point is that Facebook doesn't
control what your friends do with the information you post on your profile.
Thus, Facebook really doesn't have the ability to keep your private stuff
"private," and it's dangerous to assume that they can.

~~~
joubert
But would you be OK if google allowed the public to peruse people's inboxes?

Just like email, Facebook was initially about sharing updates, pictures, etc.
with your family and friends (i.e. people you know). Now they seem to be
trying to trick people into having all this information public.

This is analogous to gmail defaulting to usenet posting, unless you configure
obscure and fluid privacy settings.

~~~
natrius
Facebook was initially about sharing things with _everyone at your school_.
Anything you shared could be accessed by an alum who works at the company
you're applying to. The only real privacy difference between now and 2004 is
that posts are Googleable by default now.

Facebook did not try to trick people into sharing people more people than they
intended to. If you disagree, explain what's misleading about this:
[http://www.allfacebook.com/2009/12/how-to-use-facebooks-
new-...](http://www.allfacebook.com/2009/12/how-to-use-facebooks-new-privacy-
transition-tool/)

------
mkn
_...to believe that information on Facebook or other social networks is
inherently private or “yours” is just wrong._

If the "victim" didn't want to get raped, she should have dressed less
provocatively, not gone out after dark, and not had those drinks.

It's the same argument, and it's just as wrongheaded and lame.

The argument fails in both cases for the same reason: It ignores the larger
social context of behavior. It's ironic that the "you shouldn't have trusted
social media" argument is sociopathic and antisocial. It fails to see the
social nature of social media!

The complex matrix of interdependencies that make civilization (writ large)
and social media (writ small) possible depend upon a notion of trust that
depends upon both parties seeing beyond "I'll do whatever I can to you if I
can get away with it." The relationship between a user of a social media site
and its user has to be one of trust _because_ the media site holds the power.

If FB really cannot hold up its end of the deal, then it really isn't the
social media site that will fill that need. It's positively stupid of
Zuckerberg to think he's going to get good data in the long run by betraying
his users now. FB will either be replaced via market forces or destroy the
social niche through its monopoly. Bluntly, people will choose another option
if they can or sabotage their data if they can't.

------
hsmyers
I don't mind sharing with those I explicitly choose--- it is everyone else
that bothers me. The idiotic mantra of 'privacy is dead' is being used to
fanboy those who are killing it for a buck.

~~~
derefr
And what if those you explicitly choose, go on to share it further? Privacy is
simply a byproduct of the large amount of friction the physical world puts on
propagating information. Putting information online is like transmitting a
signal through a vaccuum—there's nothing to stop it, so it just keeps going.

~~~
pyre
> _And what if those you explicitly choose, go on to share it further?_

Consider applying that logic a little differently:

1\. Should the Post Office be able to open, scan and publish all mail that
they process? It should be perfectly reasonable. The person that I'm sending
the mail to could do the same thing, so the Post Office has every right to do
that!

2\. If I put a gun into the hands of a convicted murderer, and he murders
someone with it, does he get scot-free just because I 'should have known
better?'

When someone leaks information that was meant to be private/confidential, you
are trusting that person to keep that information private/confidential. To say
that someone "should have known better" than to trust _anyone_ with _any
information_ is to say that we should all be hermits, and that society
shouldn't exist. As ludicrous as that sounds, that is the basic claim that one
makes when asserting that, 'no information shared between two people is 100%
guaranteed to be private.'

Whether you realize it or not, your basic claim -- at its heart -- is that
it's ok for Facebook to breach your trust just because it's also possible for
other people to do so.

~~~
derefr
I said nothing about Facebook. Facebook is a manifestation of a social
network, and thus cannot _be_ private by definition. All it does is allow
people to spread things, and to do it efficiently as possible; it has no other
use. Privacy exists _going into_ the Internet, not _on_ the Internet.

But the Internet is not the problem. Instead, the problem is this attitude:

> If someone in my circle of friends shares something with the outside world
> that they shouldn't have, then they are in the wrong and will have to accept
> whatever the punishment is

 _This isn't how the real world works_.

Your friends have other trusted friends that _aren't_ you. The separation
isn't between "my circle of friends" and "the outside world"; there _is_ no
"outside world." Your circle of friends each has their own circles of friends,
who have their own, and those circles, together, comprise the entirety of the
world. There is no separation; no barrier there. It's a problem of incorrect
perspective to put a dividing line around the people connected to _you_ and no
one else—because, to everyone else, that's not where the line is. It's around
_them_ , and _their_ friends.

You'll ask your friend for advice on something, who will delegate the question
to their own friend. You tell someone a secret and ten other people will find
out, all in complete confidence. You'll end up doing embarrassing things in
other people's wedding pictures, or being captured in a photo alongside them
in a bar. This isn't something that can remain private, because these _aren't
facts about you_. They're stories occurring in other people's worlds, in other
people's circles—they just happen, tangentially, to have you as _a property_
of them.

Now, usually, all this leaked information doesn't _come back_ to you—people
have the sensibility to keep the secret secret. And the world goes on that way
just fine. Ten people will know about something embarrassing you did, but,
because they are aware of the rules of our culture, they won't tell you they
know, and you can go on leading your life pretending nobody knows.

The problem with the privacy after the advent of the Internet is _not_ that
these people now know your secrets. The problem with the Internet is that it
makes _the slip-ups of the third-parties_ public, permanent, and irrevocable.
It vocalizes the maid-and-butler conversations that we all managed to pretend
weren't happening, and, in doing so, ruins our collective facade of propriety.

And, unless we throw away everything about how the Internet works, we're just
going to have to learn to work around that permanence. If anything, we need to
kill _the desire for sites like Facebook_ , not Facebook itself; we need to
remove ourselves from our collective lecterns and podiums before we ruminate
upon others' secrets. And that's hard–that's changing human nature, or at the
very least, the nature of Western society. But that's what we have to do, if
we want to keep this gift of a worldwide network of permanently-remembering
machines alive.

(And note—what Facebook is doing right now has nothing to do with all of this.
Everything that Facebook has done to "decrease" the privacy level of its
userbase could have been done by a third-party by collecting the login details
of a few not-particularly-privacy-conscious[1] volunteers and then spidering
Facebook from their viewpoints, re-building its social graph within their own
servers. This could still be done today, and is _not_ an exploit that can be
patched in any way, shape or form. As I said: social networks are inherently
public.)

[1] Like these: [http://www.silicon.com/special-features/protecting-your-
id/2...](http://www.silicon.com/special-features/protecting-your-
id/2004/03/19/one-in-five-brits-not-learning-id-theft-lessons-39119357/)

~~~
pyre
> _Everything that Facebook has done to "decrease" the privacy level of its
> userbase could have been done by a third-party by collecting the login
> details of a few not-particularly-privacy-conscious[1] volunteers and then
> spidering Facebook from their viewpoints, re-building its social graph
> within their own servers._

Saying that something 'could have been done by someone else' does not prove
the 'right-ness' or 'wrong-ness' of it.

~~~
derefr
All I meant by that was that Facebook isn't actually _doing_ anything _now_ ;
they're just demonstrating the effects of something they did long ago, when
they first asked people to pick out their friends and store that list as part
of their profiles. At _that_ moment, everything became public, because a
social network was formed.

And you skipped over the point I made above—whether or not Facebook did
anything wrong (let's say it did, so we can stop arguing), that is
_immaterial_ as long as social networks exist on the Internet, because they
_all_ do exactly the same thing, just not as visibly or as quickly. If you
don't like what Facebook is doing, you need to face up to the fact that you
just _don't like putting your social network online_ , and accept that
nothing—not a Diaspora, or a private mailing list, or anything else—will ever
plug the hole that has been made in "privacy" by the advent of digital
information.

------
drivingmenuts
At least part of the problem is the near-constant change in privacy standards
at Facebook and the ever-growing TOS. If users could lock into one explicitly-
stated clear Terms of Service, then perhaps we wouldn't be so worried. Then,
if Facebook wanted to change the terms, new users would come in under the new
ToS and older users could opt in, if they wanted to.

Yes, it causes more of a headache for Facebook (or any service that opts to
follow that route), but it sets a level of expectation and puts everyone on
level playing field.

As it stands right now, unless I'm prepared to read a document that's longer
than the Constitution, I pretty much have no idea what they're doing with
information that, yes, I'm willing to share with friends, but not the world.

------
jay_kyburz
Isn't the problem the ever changing privacy policy. At one stage you are led
to believe some information is private, just for you and your loved ones, then
a with a change of Facebooks polices that information is shared with the whole
internet.

It's the shifting sands thats uncool.

~~~
natrius
The sands didn't shift without clear messaging that the sand was shifting and
how you could opt-out of it. This is what it looked like:
[http://www.allfacebook.com/2009/12/how-to-use-facebooks-
new-...](http://www.allfacebook.com/2009/12/how-to-use-facebooks-new-privacy-
transition-tool/)

Instant Personalization was a bad idea, but everything else was pretty
straightforward.

~~~
mistermann
Seriously, do you expect the average facebook user to comprehend this stuff?
Really?

Facebook knows people don't pay attention to details, and even if they tried
to, they couldn't figure it out.

If you truly disagree, I'd say it is because of the curse of
knowledge...you've understood this type of thing for so long, that you can't
imagine what it's like to not understand it.

~~~
natrius
Yes, I do. 35% of users adjusted their settings when presented with that
dialog, and that's not including the people who had modified their privacy
settings in the past, which made them not default to "Everyone".

[http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/facebook_brags_35_adjus...](http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/facebook_brags_35_adjusted_their_privacy_settings.php)

Most people understood what was going on. You and many others are assuming
otherwise without any evidence to back it up.

------
mrvir
Basic engineering approach is to look at the direction and the rate of change
to estimate where the system is heading. The decline of privacy in FB has been
well documented by EFF among others. FB has taken 900M of investor money. What
is their business model to make money? I think this is what worries many
people here.

~~~
ErrantX
It's interesting to call it the decline of privacy. That's purely a product of
this current hype.

The reality is that _if you want it to be_ facebook is a lot more private now
than it was in early 09.

I may have mentioned before that I have several fb profiles with which to do
security research. Last year I could have picked up a whole load of
information on just about anyone - today, it's either a lot more difficult or
insanely easy (mostly the former).

And that "ease" is simply a product of Facebook hiding controls or encouraging
people to be open. _that_ is what we need to focus on.

------
malcognition
softwarerebellion.wordpress.com

