Facebook Privacy Mess

I think Liz Gannes of GigaOM does a good job of laying out the mess that Facebeek has stumbled into with the recent revisions of its privacy policy, although characterizing it as needing to ‘find its voice’ makes it sound like mere marketing spin. The reality goes much deeper:

Liz Gannes, Facebook Needs to Find Its Voice on Privacy

First of all, the relationship between privacy and Facebook is always going to be complicated. This is the issue for the company, and will continue to be. Facebook needs its users’ trust in order to provide them value. But the company has been slipping up — on a number of fronts. First, it overstepped user comfort levels with the rollout of instant personalization features that are opt-out rather than opt-in. (It’s also setting itself up for another maelstrom over user data retention.) Meanwhile, Facebook’s privacy controls continue to be way too complicated — the whole product itself needs significant improvements. And lastly, it’s suffering multiple unintended security holes, both by itself and its partners.

These problems build on each other. Now the leading narrative in the media is that Facebook is cavalier about privacy. Last night came the news that Facebook had to shut down one of its three carefully chosen instant personalization partners, Yelp, for repeated insecure protection of user data. Some prominent users are leaving the site altogether, and they’re perceived as level-headed technologists rather than Chicken Little-types. An upstart group of four programmers building a private alternative to Facebook called Diaspora has gained steam incredibly quickly. And some widely read tech commentators say they believe Facebook’s leadership is evil.

The rising narrative about Facebook is that they could care less about what users need or want. Facebook is apparently pursuing a strategy of maximal financial reward for the company based on stripmining all sorts of information that users might think is private, but isn’t, or information they might like to keep private, but can’t. The recent NY Times Q&A with Elliot Schrage was an example of the company trying to deflect criticisms about it policies by suggesting that they simply haven’t been doing a good enough job of communicating. I’m sorry, but when Genghis Khan is burning down your city, having a carefully worded press release on the topic doesn’t really make it better.

I joined the herds leaving Facebook this week, although so far I have only deactiviated my account. When I return from Europe, I am going to figure out how to drop it altogether, after letting various contacts know. For me, it’s not much of a hardship since I don’t use Facebook actively.

My bet is that Facebook will regroup by making some of the most egregious privacy pitfalls — like instant personalization — opt in. If they don’t various governments, like the EU in particular, will certainly require that they do so. But that will not be enough to make this stink go away. Facebook would have to demonstrate for a considerable time that it was going to put the interests of their users ahead of their goals for world domination; short of that, I for one won’t buy some new found interest in user privacy.