-
Please support me in the 2010 Ride to Conquer Cancer - last year we were able to raise $6.9 million for the Alberta Cancer Foundation - hopefully we can raise even more in 2010! -
Blog under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License
Jan
16
(2008)
Facebook considered harmful?
Filed under: general. Tags: facebook, information, ownership, privacy, thoughts.
Walking across campus this morning, I passed a couple dozen students with laptops open, sucking the wifi network. I wasn’t trying to snoop, but I noticed that well over half of them had browsers open to Facebook. It struck me that they are spending much of their time pumping content and data into a proprietary commercial venture. And they’re fine with it. I’m pretty sure they’re capable of understanding what it means to provide so much information about themselves – what they like, who they know, what they’re doing, the music they listen to, the books they read, their vocabulary, things they’re selling/buying, etc…
But, I fear they don’t actively think about what it means to give this personal data so freely to a commercial venture that has one singular purpose: to profit from their information, in any way possible.
And Facebook isn’t alone – we’re using Google Docs and the rest of the Google Apps suite, essentially teaching Google’s advertising engine with the most intimate and powerful data about ourselves. The Google Toolbar tracks what we search for, and what we see.
Universities are also guilty in this – we compel students to publish their content within the confines of the sanctioned LMS, where it can evaporate at the end of each semester. We provide them with email addresses, web space, etc… all of which evaporate when they graduate, and are not truly “theirs”.
It strikes me that an entire generation of our upcoming best-and-brightest minds are developing in an environment where they are comfortable not owning their own information, and even worse – they are comfortable with corporate entities mining every bit of minutiae about themselves in order to make a buck. In a “best case” scenario, these students simply aren’t aware of what this means, and this becomes an education issue. In a “worst case” scenario, they are aware, consenting, and active participants in this.
This scares the hell out of me. These students will be forming our governments in a few years, and running our companies.
How do we steer this ship onto a more wholesome, individual-centric course, where individuals not only want to own their own information, but also to effectively control who has access to it, and what they can do with it?
[...] dnorman wrote an interesting post today on Facebook considered harmful?Here’s a quick excerptI wasn’t trying to snoop, but I noticed that well over half of them had browsers open to Facebook. It struck me that they are spending much of their time pumping content and data into a proprietary commercial venture. … [...]
I was under the impression that Google with Google Docs, Gmail, etc. would parse what you’ve written to show the ad but was not using the information otherwise.
On the flip side when was the last time you met someone who read the privacy policy and/or the TOS/EULA of a website, product or anything else they use everyday? The complete selling out of one’s information to whomever (evil or not is and should be a moot point) is distressing. However when it’s convenient, you don’t feel like you’ve sold yourself and it makes your life easier (eg. sharing pictures on Facebook, creating groups and events on Facebook) it’s quite easy to make the tradeoff seem worthwhile.
If anything I wish they taught in school (Starting in elementary, at least in Junior High and it’s a bit late for High School) the importance of knowing what you’re giving up for what you’re getting. The amount I can remember it being broached in my education has been that it was mentioned and dismissed with a “yes-yes” in a matter of minutes.
.
i used to be more scared. perhaps corporations can be seen as having the primary purpose of fulfilling people’s desires instead.
.
“they are comfortable with corporate entities mining every bit of minutiae about themselves in order to make a buck.”
Most everyone I know is aware that their information is being sold, correlated, etc. Since when is it wrong for a corporation to try to make money? Their terms are plain, and they are offering a service at the price of data to feed statistics engines. Frankly, I’ve benefitted from their service many times over. I think it’s a fair exchange.
For my part I’m not so concerned what a corporation (an entity subject to the law in the US, and at least theoretically subject to class action lawsuits) is going to do with my information. I’m more concerned with what certain overpowered American government entities might do with my information.
- Aron
I don’t know… I think it sets up a pretty scary precedent for people to just hand their data to anyone else to manage for them. I suppose there’s got to be a level of trust there, but how many people really read the EULA or service agreements? Some of the geekier or more legal-minded people might. But I’d be pretty surprised if the proportion of people who really read the agreement before clicking “Accept” was more than 10%.
Even if you’re relatively careful and informed, it’s pretty easy to not be aware of what’s going on. Take the Flickr app for Facebook. I used that to send photos from my (corporately hosted and managed – I pay them for the Pro service) Flickr account into my Facebook profile. What I didn’t realize was that Facebook wasn’t just using the images by referring to the Flickr versions, they were sucking copies of the files into the Facebook platform and using those. That might not be a big deal, but it was a behaviour that I didn’t expect, and a direct result of a company needing to manage and control access to content.
I think there are larger issues at play here – what does it really mean when people willingly hand over control of their content? What relationship makes that exchange fair? Is it being able to play Scrabble for free online? Is it something deeper than that?
Hmm — y’know you just stumbled on to my thesis topic?
I agree with you on the Scrabble/random application aspect, but for me the system has paid off socially which, since I’m a social creature, is probably the best justification for this exchange. I got back in touch with the girl who was my last girlfriend via facebook, I got back in touch with the girl who is my present girlfriend via facebook, and I got my latest side-contract from a former client on facebook (doesn’t seem the ideal place for professional interaction, but he tracked me down nonetheless). The list of people I’ve gotten back into touch with from my past is lengthy. So no, my information isn’t being thrown to the wolves for the sake of Scrabble, but the relationships the system allows me to (re)form and cultivate. Scrabble is just a perk. =)
Hence I canceled my fb account
Still working on PPL, and I think we need a distributed app like I described to you… Until then, enjoy giving up your privacy. Google Docs actually has all permissions to do whatever with your data, there really isn’t any restriction… What they do with it right now isn’t necessarily all that they could do with it if they wanted… and when they decide to do something, you’re up a creek without a paddle.
@Aron: You should really call and talk to more people rather than writing on their wall, you will find it’s more rewarding.
@Sami:
“Perhaps you should call and talk to more people rather than X. You will find it’s more rewarding.”
eg: Sami, perhaps you should call and talk to more people rather than leaving notes on D’Arcy’s blog. You will find it’s more rewarding.
You might see why I could interpret your comments as condescending. Also, not directly related to the argument at hand. This is about whether my personal information is a fair trade for the product Facebook is offering, not whether I have enough of a life to be communicating outside of Facebook.
Frankly, I’m a social successful person and I do call and talk to people as well. My experience lately is that Facebook has been more rewarding vehicle for rekindling communication than cold-calling people I know from the phone book.
I could generate a decent argument, but I am not in the mood… You’re right the comment was condescending, because I think your attitude towards your own privacy is abhorrent and because I had already made up my mind on that I decided to be condescending rather than actually arguing, sorry about that. But all in all, it’s a personal choice, you wanna be a facebook bitch because it helps you social life, go ahead… I personally wouldn’t make that trade-off, and have recently completely quit making that sort of trade-off that in the past I found acceptable… Even if it were the only medium of communication, I wouldn’t trade my privacy to the extent people are casually doing it… I will wait, or actually create something that suits me better — in fact I am working on such a project right now… I have been there, done that, and do see the utility in it … but my personal feeling at this point is that the cost is too high and the owners of facebook are very happy with the fact that users for a little bit of social utility will sell their souls to a corporation whose employees contact you with their first names when you try to talk to them. Further it would be arbitrarily easy for facebook to implement systems to allow users to delete information from their system, but they don’t… Why? Most likely because they are a greedy corporation that wants to mine people’s information so they can sell it to marketers and worse yet the government. That sort of information can be used against you in many ways including the court of law, or worse yet through something like 6 degrees of freedom tie you to a terrorist group because you write articles that are not appreciated by people in power. So you see Aron, I could make an argument I just don’t bother because I think intelligent people would already realize this and not support such services because of the risks as D’Arcy pointed out, unfortunately not many people are in that category.
^ six degrees of separation, sorry.
okay okay. let’s try to keep it civil
there are benefits to Facebook – I got in touch with the group of “kids” I hung out with 30 years ago (yes, I’m that old). Now, is the Corporate Big Brother aspect of Facebook worth it? Likely not. It would be trivially easy for anyone to find me if they so wished. I usually wish I was harder to find, but it’s pretty easy to find anyone if you really want to. Facebook makes it drop-dead easy, and I’ve used it to communicate with others that I otherwise wouldn’t have. I think there’s some kind of social etiquette at play – like Aron said, you don’t just cold call people (whether email or phone) but Facebook makes it pretty safe and non-threatening to connect with people.
but, I still think it would be better for people to maintain ownership of their personal information, and for systems to respect and leverage that. Facebook would be completely possible, even simpler to implement, if every member was managing their own extended OpenID profile and making decisions about who could see which information, in which context(s).
facebook’s attitude is all your data is belong to us… Google has the same attitude but for certain reasons facebook has gotten the data where Google is still having a hard time prying it from their users fingers. They’ll keep trying though. BTW Aron, I don’t believe most people know that facebook is creating a revisioned database about them, not just grabbing information to process it… So every single fact you feed to facebook about you is theirs forever and whoever gives them a buck can know that about you… Also all messages belong to them and they do not guarantee to protect that information from anyone who may hack their system, etc. In perhaps 10-20 years when facebook doesn’t exist and the assets are sold on the cheap, anyone may be able to buy that data on the cheap, say $50.00, any content belongs to them fully and they may do with it whatever they wish. That’s what you’re agreeing to, and I think you are seriously misinformed about what you’re giving up in return for a little bit of benefit of connecting with your friends and seeing at a few pictures of them now and then.
D, what you need is something like an easy to deploy platform with the same capabilities that has open id built in and an install can be deployed as easily as a facebook account is created. Ideally, that’s what you want. That’s also trivially easy as the tools already exist to a great extent, it’s just we need push behind doing something like it and a trivial implementation to show people the way.
@sami: exactly. something that is just file-based so there’s no database to manage (this exists, I played with a file-based OpenID server on my dreamhost account – it wasn’t ready for prime time though). But that won’t cover a huge portion of people who don’t have servers. For these, it’d be ideal if it was baked into .Mac, WordPress.com, Blogger.com, etc… (although they are corporate services, the data could still be owned by the individual subscribers) AOL is the single biggest pool of OpenID users – it could be extended to manage personal profile data pretty easily.
Sami: I will continue to avoid attacking you personally in spite of your insistence on this form of argument.
Filtering out ad hominem, I respect your efforts to form a project that resolves your privacy concerns and if you conceived of something that could compete with Facebook’s offerings while taking a firm stance on user privacy, I’d consider jumping on board.
I think you perhaps place too little emphasis on the importance of connecting with friends and “seeing a few pictures of them now and then”.
I’m going to end my contribution to this discussion right here. All the best.
@Aron: I think we got off on the wrong foot. Sorry about that.
Hey D’arcy,
Thanks for the discussion – something many of us have been thinking about (and talking about) for a while. You may be interested in Pew’s study of American internet users (random sample of 2400). Sadly, their findings support your observations: “Fully 60% of internet users say they are not worried about how much information is available about them online. Similarly, the majority of online adults (61%) do not feel compelled to limit the amount of information that can be found about them online.” http://www.pewinternet.org/PPF/r/229/report_display.asp
Lots of discussion here at UBC about how to approach this on the education front.
This discussion fit right in to a blog post I’m writing about advertising in web 2.0 apps, which I’d like to use to cobble together a CMS of sorts. I work for a public community college, and I’m put off by the ads. Advertising in apps is the “in your face” result of the “collect your data” practiced by Google and Facebook. Your data is collected so they can advertise to you, and that’s easier to do if they legally “own” it. Do I lose ownership of my home address when I put it into a web form to order something? I wonder now. I”ve thought for years that most of my efforts to “limit” the amount of information about me online are likely futile. I keep doing it just to make me feel better.
I cancelled my Facebook account, not because I had D’arcy’s deep understanding of the technology, but because 24 hours later I suddenly had an attack on my hosted server, which began sending out spam. This forced me to stop hosting Moodle because it could not longer email my students; my host claimed I was suddenly exceeding my limit on emails per day. Since I had done nothing else new, I figured there was a connection.
D’arcy, while I appreciate your focus on databases and storage, I’m not sure I care whether a big company says they are not storing my information, or that my email will not be published (thanks, Wordpress) — it is simply not in their interest to protect my privacy at any level. As an economic historian, I know better.
[...] Norman notes in his blog post about Facebook that students today seem inordinately comfortable sharing a lot of personal information wth big [...]
Facebook considered harmful?I agree with some of your concerns. It is disturbing when children expose themselves on-line. I think as educators should start in class to teach children as early as from elementary the importance of “knowing what you are giving up for what you are getting” as somebody put it. In technology classes teachers should teach the kind of information that should be made secret and not to be put on-line and also information that is solely made for online purposes. Teachers should give concrete examples from newspapers or online-news that show real people like them getting into problems. In this way the problem appeals to their emotions. Parents at home should compliment the education that students get from school. They should not assume that it is only the responsibility of teachers. You have a point when it comes to the universities failing to provide space online for students to carry on with their work after graduating. Universities should do something about it.
The only time I have a second opinion is when you said -‘ an entire generation of our upcoming best-and-brightest minds are developing in an environment where they are comfortable not owning their own information, and even worse…’ Well, I support you when you talk about information that exposes students’ personal and confidential information, however, when it comes to putting scholarly ideas on-line I have no problem with that because I believe in the Death of the Author a concept which says no body owns ideas, once ideas are published ( eg. On-line) everyone is free to have different interpretations of those ideas.
Facebook is harmful… take this for example, somebody created a user and uploaded all MY photos as if he were me cursing at people and getting me in fights. I’m not the first victim of that horrible assault. Somebody also created a user in my girlfriend’s name and uploaded all her photos. He added all boys from our area and told them bad things making my friend look like a “slut”. I hope Facebook finds a solution for this privacy assault. I don’t want to use facebook ever again neither do my friends just because of this incident.
that’s not really a facebook issue as much as “your friends are assholes” issue.
tell me about it …
but no it is a facebook issue because facebook is not deleting that user by that allowing him to ruin my reputation !