www.readwriteweb.com/archives/privacy_facebook_and_the_future_of_the_internet.php
Data Privacy Day and a whole bunch of companies are listed on the organization's website as participants. Facebook is not listed as a participant and has stirred up a lot of controversy with changes to its privacy policy lately. Why are these corporations singing out loud about protecting our personal privacy? According to the website, "Data Privacy Day is an international celebration of the dignity of the individual expressed through personal information." More than dignity, this is about building trust with consumers so that these companies can do things with our personal data. Aggregate data analysis and personal recommendation could be the foundation of the next step of the internet. Unfortunately, Facebook's recent privacy policy changes put that future at risk by burning the trust of hundreds of millions of mainstream users. Facebook's privacy changes were bad for two reasons: because they violated the trust of hundreds of millions of users, putting many of them at risk where they had felt safe before, and because by burning that trust in the first major social network online, the next generation of online innovation built on top of social network user data is put at risk. Had Facebook opened up access to user data through users' consent - then access to that data would be a whole different story. As is, the privacy change was unclear and pushed-through without user choice concerning some key data, putting the whole concept of users sharing their data at risk.
Facebook's round-up of other peoples' statements about privacy today on its blog. How Facebook Changed This past December, Facebook did an about-face on privacy.
Facebook's obsession with privacy slowed down the work of people who wanted to build cool new features or find important social patterns on top of all the connections we users make between people, places and things on the site. Not going to happen at Facebook, founder Mark Zuckerberg said, due to privacy concerns. Facebook as a living census unlike any the world has ever seen? Facebook staff did team with a few outside academics they knew and studied that Facebook data themselves.
published some charts about racial demographics on Facebook, concluding that everything was peachy-keen and only getting better on the social network. But if you thought an army of independent analysts could glean some objective insights into the contemporary human condition out of Facebook, you were wrong.
Facebook began prompting users to re-evaluate their privacy settings. Public was the new default and some fields on a user's profile were suddenly and irrevocably made visible to the web at large. Your photo, your list of friends and your interests as expressed through fan page subscriptions could no longer be set to private. Sorry, 350 million people who signed up for the old system. When Facebook said in the fine print that it reserved the right to change its policies, the company really meant it.
The changes were responded to with an international wave of confusion and indignation. News stories were written all around the world about Facebook's privacy changes - they're still being written today.
its second investigation in six months into Facebook's privacy policies. Is it naive to think that things you post on the internet are really "private?" Many people say it is, but that was core to the value proposition that Facebook grew up on. Presumably the companies working together on International Data Privacy Day don't believe that privacy online is a lost cause. In fact, trusting that your private data will remain private could be a key requirement for everyday, mainstream users to be willing to input all the more of their personal data into systems that would build value on top of that data. Facebook is the first system ever that allowed hundreds of millions of people around the world to input information about their most personal interests, no matter how minor. Will that information serve as a platform for developers to build applications and for social observers to tell us things about ourselves that we never could have seen without a bird's eye view? That would be far more likely if more people trusted the systems they input their data into.
Think of the mashup between US census data and mortgage loan data that exposed the racist practice of real-estate Redlining in the last century. Personal recommendations and the other side of that same coin - large-scale understanding of social patterns - could be the trend that defines the next era of the internet just like easy publishing of content has defined this era. Imagine this kind of future: You say: "Dear iPad (or whatever), I'm considering inviting Jane to lunch at The Observatory on Thursday, what can you tell me about that? Then your Web 30-enabled iPad (or whatever) says to you: "Jane has not eaten Sushi in the past 6 weeks but has 2 times in the year so far.
Please note that there is a landmark within 100 yards of The Observatory for which the Wikipedia page is tagged with 3 keywords that match your recent newspaper reading interest-list and 4 of Jane's. "People who like sushi and that landmark also tend to like the movie showing at a theatre down the street. Since you have race and class demographics turned on, though, I can also tell you that college-educated black people tend to give that director's movies unusually bad reviews. How long ago was it that it sounded crazy to think a day would come when you typed little notes into your computer about how you felt and all your friends and family saw them? But how many people will trust this new class of systems enough to contribute meaningfully to them, now that they've been burned by Facebook? On International Data Privacy Day, it's good to consider the possible implications of Facebook's actions not just on users in the short term, but on the larger ecosystem of online development and innovation over time.
Subscribe to comments for all ReadWriteWeb posts 1 Kim-Mai, thanks for stopping by. I added the following, does this clarify what I'm arguing? Had Facebook opened up access to user data through users' consent - then access to that data would be a whole different story. As is, the privacy change was unclear and pushed-through without user choice concerning some key data, putting the whole concept of users sharing their data at risk.
the future is all about governance, and the best government is a local one. all of this leads to niche social networks, who then in turn will create a government amongst themselves to facilitate data sharing. expect new things like users being allowed to formally vote on policies, or even to campaign for certain positions within the social network. in the USA we've seen corporations take over the government.
Perhaps the contract itself is going the way of the dodo. Contracts used to be unchangeable, and both parties were held to them. But trust can not exist with such fluid "commitments", where contracts are no longer worth the electrons they're written with and only one party gets to deal with the negative consequences of the relationship.
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