Facebook and “radical transparency”
zephoria.org
zephoria.org
Do people who share their status with "everyone" really understand that their entire history of updates are being scraped and aggregated by "partners," or do they think that it's only being read by people who happen to search for them personally?
As the author puts it, it's a case of a lack of informed consent. And that is unethical.
I don't think the problem is people underestimating friends of friends. It's not knowing when they're sharing with everyone. Instead of having to click a button below the status box to see who you're going to be sharing with, the current setting should be displayed on the button itself so it's always visible.
Informed consent is a much higher standard than simple "consent."
The argument here is that while Facebook may technically be telling you everything you need to know, they aren't actually achieving informed consent. If you mistakenly think "everyone" means everyone who uses Facebook personally, you haven't given them informed consent to share your information with a credit bureau.
Possible side effects of this setting include: Getting fired for your political beliefs, inability to get a loan due to a status update that indicated financial irresponsibility, and a speedy end to any political campaign you attempt to start.
This seems like a pretty big double standard. Twitter is public by default, but no one is setting the same bar for informed consent. The issue isn't the change from private to public; I think most people who accept that default understand that their posts are no longer private by default. I don't see why explaining more is necessary.
This privacy change happened in December, by the way. If it weren't for Instant Personalization, this firestorm never would've happened.
perhaps you and I should get clear on the word necessary. Here's a thought experiment: Imagine we poll some statistically significant number of users and ask them questions about their own settings like "Can your mother see this? Do you think you could be denied a job if you were to post this?" and so forth.
One possibility is that the vast majority of the people would get the answers right. They understand the implications and are happy with their choices. The other possibility is that some large number of respondents don't get the answers right, indicating that they don't understand the implications.
The standard I feel is appropriate for all companies trafficking in information with such serious potential outcomes is that their customers understand the implications of their choices.
How much explaining is necessary? I say enough to achieve understanding. It's flat-out unethical to conduct a business where a substantial proportion of your 'customers' do not understand the implications of doing business with you.
Of course, the plural of anecdote is not "data." Maybe the OP has it wrong and most Facebook users understand what choices they are making and simply don't value their privacy as much as outraged nerds on a forum.
I'm not saying it's wrong for Facebook to share people's data with "everyone," only pointing out that IMO it would be unethical to do so if a significant proportion of their users did not give their informed consent.
Who does? Most users I know of any system (hackers included) prefer simplicity.
Of course users WANT simplicity-- they also want their software to do everything that want it to do. This is how bloated software gets built.
Do you have an alternate explanation as to why smart product designers would make privacy controls complex/powerful rather than simple/less-customizable? Do you really think they are TRYING to confuse people?
Sure. I think it's in Facebook's best interest to make their users' data as public as possible.
It would run counter to FB's interests if they had privacy settings that were as simple as:
- "Hide all my stuff"
- "Show my stuff to friends only"
- "Show my stuff to friends of friends"
- "Show my stuff to the whole wide world"
I've yet to hear a good explanation as to why the default FB privacy option has become more and more open, while they added more granular privacy controls. Which likely means there isn't one that benefits users as much as it does Facebook.
> Do you really think they are TRYING to confuse people?
No. But I do think that responsible product design is about making difficult decisions for the benefit of one's users. And Facebook is shirking that responsibility by putting its own needs ahead of its users... while putting the onus on users to restore their privacy settings to what they were when they signed up by using confusing tools.
> Youth are actually much more concerned about exposure than adults these days. Why? Probably because they get it. And it’s why they’re using fake names ....
Well, I'm glad they're concerned. However, there's getting it, and then there's getting it.
I'm definitely on the adult end of things (I'm 44). I tended to use made-up names in net discussions until relatively recently. But I consistently found myself tempted to make comments that I would not want my real identity to be associated with. So, when I got my HN account in early '09, I used an abbreviation of my real name, as a reminder to myself that I shouldn't say anything I would not want to be associated with (and also that there is a good chance that even "anonymous" comments could be traced to the real me someday).
And that seems to me (in my arrogance?) to be a rather deeper level of "getting it" than that attained by many of the above-mentioned youth using fake names.
> Over and over again, I find that people’s mental model of who can see what doesn’t match up with reality.
Definitely. And this is not a new phenomenon at all. I remember reading the Usenet group misc.kids back in the 90s, and being shocked at all the personal details of children's lives that some parents were posting, often under apparently real names. The newsgroup was being treated as a neighborhood mothers gossip group, not as something that the whole world could see, and that would be archived forever.
EDIT. And a third passage:
> The battle that is underway is not a battle over the future of privacy and publicity. It’s a battle over choice and informed consent.
An excellent point, and one that needs to be made more often. Despite what the article says, the statement "young people don't care about privacy" might indeed be true, in general. However, even if it is, that does not mean it is okay to make privacy-related decisions for them. And it certainly does not mean it is okay to invade their privacy by means of trickery and deceit.
Could the second category be realized as an algorithm/interface-aspect? Because, basically, this is what Facebook comes down to: "I want to share things with people I have determined will be nice to me, and people that those people have also determined will be nice to me." Note that the second clause isn't "will be nice to them." If A trusts B, and B trusts C, but A hates C and B knows that, then the ideal social network would somehow encode that.
Right now, all I can imagine in an O(n^2) operation where, every time you make a friend, you mark a subset of your friends as their peripheral friends. There's gotta be a better way than that.
http://www.google.com/trends?q=delete+facebook+account,+face...
This seems to suggest that fewer people are searching to delete their account, proportional to the number of people using facebook.
Zuckerberg has no business discussing "a lack of integrity" other than his own.
This comment seem a little over the top to me, but all in all, as someone who has used Facebook for a grand total of an hour over a year ago, I found it to be a very interesting article.
Particularly if it goes against the old, ingrained ways of thinking I'm all the more for it.
As I investigated it more (admittedly since social graph announcement and other developments of late ) I decided to remove my account.
My decision was based in part due the fact that I have friends and colleagues who do not enjoy the relative safety both political, and social, that I enjoy as an educated white American citizen of heterosexual persuasion. In a sense I feel that it is irresponsible of me to possibly "out" a friend by accident just because it is a non issue for me.
I find the statements attributed to Zuckerberg profoundly distressing and ignorant of the world we live in, you don't have to go far to find people who maintain different identities so they can merely survive. it is a lack of intellectual integrity on his part.
Here's the argument: people keep secrets because people keep secrets. Those of us who have different sexual orientations and make other non-traditional lifestyle choices keep it secret because it's socially taboo, but it's socially taboo only because we continue keeping it secret. We'd be better off if that was broken down, but you don't want to be the first one coming out of the closet. Thanks to game theory we're all worse off. That's why you need to change the game. 20 years ago you'd be shocked to find that your uncle was in a gay polyamorous relationship. The idea is to build a world where you won't care because you'll know two dozen gay people and two dozen polyamorous people.
Transparency starts at home, Facebook is not a transparent organization, if his ideals call for it, he should be the first in line, and his business should tag along. his case would look better if he led by example.
I happen to agree with this. Most of the thoughts that people share with each other are completely harmless. Allowing those to be visible by everyone helps us to learn more about ourselves and our society. It's a good default as long as people are aware of what they're doing. Even if people realize what their default settings are (which I think most people understood when they were being set but might have forgotten), there should be a visible reminder of who you're sharing with to minimize mistakes.
We currently live in a private-by-default society, and changing that would be a good thing.
To what? A public-by-default?
Do you tell your parents about your sex life?
Or share your health updates with your co-workers?
Or something more innocuous - do you tell your friends how much money you make?
Even if you answered yes to these questions, recognize that the decision to share that information belongs to the individual, not anybody else.
Yes.
I share some of those things you mentioned, and I think our society would be better off if it were more acceptable to do so. However, those are absurd examples to bring up in this discussion. Few shared those things on Facebook even when it was friends-only. In the context of things people typically share on Facebook, public-by-default is perfectly appropriate.
Even if people did share those things privately on Facebook, we're talking about defaults. Out of all the things people share on Facebook, a small fraction of posts actually need to be private in the eyes of their authors. The default settings should reflect that, and people should restrict privacy when they need to.
"...recognize that the decision to share that information belongs to the individual, not anybody else."
No one has suggested otherwise.
In the context of Facebook they are absurd, but your claim was about society at large, not Facebook.
> In the context of things people typically share on Facebook, public-by-default is perfectly appropriate.
The problem is changing from private-by-default to public-by-default and forcing people to opt-out. Facebook is effectively making the decision about what individuals share using a bait-and-switch.
Put another way, it's grow on the backs of their users, then screw them.
> Out of all the things people share on Facebook, a small fraction of posts actually need to be private in the eyes of their authors.
You mean, in your eyes a small fraction of your posts actually need to be private.
[1] http://www.allfacebook.com/2009/12/how-to-use-facebooks-new-...
> You mean, in your eyes a small fraction of your posts actually need to be private.
That's not what I meant at all. Choose a random Facebook friend who doesn't share posts with everyone. Pick a random post. Ask if she would mind if it were made public. I think the vast majority of the time, the author won't mind. Add that to the people who already share their posts with everyone and don't care.
Myspace was public by default. Twitter is public by default. The general public values privacy less than you do, and in my opinion, rightly so.
That's the point - "your" = "Facebook". Their desired behavior (most data is public) doesn't serve their users' needs. This is one of the key reasons there's such a hue and cry about this - they haven't been able to justify why having this data public is better for their users.
> given the clarity of Facebook's presentation of the options during the transition
Clarity? Much of this thread is about how poorly Facebook educated its users on what impact its new privacy settings would actually have. Clear as mud, maybe...
> That's not what I meant at all. Choose a random Facebook friend who doesn't share posts with everyone. Pick a random post. Ask if she would mind if it were made public.
Opinion. We're talking about who makes the decisions about what's "public", where "public" is defined as "available to anybody, searchable by anybody in the world, and archived forever and ever, amen".
> Myspace was public by default. Twitter is public by default.
That's my point. They were always public by default. Facebook wasn't, and went public without asking users to opt-in. That's a bait and switch.
> The general public values privacy less than you do
Source?
I believe the general public doesn't understand the value of privacy online until it blows up in her face.
Personally I only keep things private for two reasons:
1. I am ashamed of them. I would like to keep private when I make a mistake or lose emotional control. This is just vanity and it's small of me to want to keep these things private.
2. For the courtesy of others. People don't want to hear about my sex life so I don't tell them. People don't want to see my naked body so I wear clothes. That's related to privacy but different because the issue is letting people filter the information they consume, not the information they publish, and privacy is more about letting people filter the information they publish.
Privacy is more than just avoiding embarrassment; it's about control over how our own information is used.
Consider a simple case -- people don't want information about all their movements available to everyone. Stalkers, ex-spouses, business competitors, or paranoid acquaintances. We're not talking here about concealing any shameful acts, just quotidian activities.
Also consider how Facebook allows users to authoritatively link a person to an event, by tagging them in a photo. So whether the subject might want it or not, that leaves a trail for others to follow. If they don't follow their Facebook account closely, they may never even know it's happening.
You may be interested in the excellent paper "'I've Got Nothing To Hide', and Other Misunderstandings of Privacy", by Daniel J. Solove.
Next, "people don't want information about their movements to be publicly available". The question isn't what people want, but what people are entitled to.
I understand the legitimate use of secrecy (in the short term) to, for instance, hide one's suspicious-but-innocuous (or illegal-but-harmless) activities from the government. But even in the long term, let's imagine that every stoner in the United States has undeniable proof of their ongoing possession and use of marijuana made public. What's more likely to happen--that the DEA will swoop in to arrest all of them or society will realize that would be silly and hypocritical? Getting from the status quo to that point is just a question of game theory, and whether those with power will be just as exposed as those without power. Hard problems, sure, but the old bargain (we'll keep secrets and let you keep yours) is due for renegotiation.
And you're still making the mistake of thinking that the only reason you would want information to be private is because you're ashamed of it. As the paper I referred you to notes, there are other, non-secret, non-shaming information that we don't want to be easily accessible by others.
Also, wanting control doesn't imply that the person wants to falsify or hide information. Consider how hard it is to get rid of mistakes on one's credit record.