Facebook Is Not Your BFF - But It Is F----d

How frequently can someone screw up? How badly can someone wreck something that coulda been a contender? I think that Marc Zuckerberg and company are dedicated to finding out the answer to this incredibly stupid set of questions - and they are passionate about it. Its getting to be old news when its news - Facebook Screws Up Again! The headlines don't even scream it out anymore. Its more like, "hey dude, Facebook f----ed up again, ja hear?" "Yeah, ja hear that Tina and I are getting back together?" "NO WAY!" "Way." Or this text message: U hr Fbk f-ed up? K. TTUL. That's how commonplace their major league screw ups have been. Look, I get it. They want to turn a buck or two in revenue and a half a buck or so in profit. Been around, have 60 million "assets" a.k.a. friends a.k.a. profiles that should be MONEY (in all ways you can translate that). But they keep forgetting that their social network has evolved to the point that there are "rules of conduct" and there are "privacy concerns." Thats spelled p-r-i-v-a-c-y, Facebook moguls. That they may be masters of their Facebook universe but they are slaves to its behaviors. They have no way out. Yet, even after the Beacon fiasco of a few months ago, they seemed to have not learned ANYTHING. On Friday, an op. ed. appeared in the Washington Post by staffer Catherine Rampell called "What Facebook Knows That You Don't." The piece highlights a series of recent articles that say:

even if you "deactivate" your account, Facebook holds on to your profile data. This disclosure has gotten privacy groups and consumers up in arms. All the commotion about how Facebook hoards outgoing users' data got me wondering whether we're missing the more important privacy question: What happens to all the data we active members choose to delete, for privacy reasons or otherwise? Facebook's privacy policy is disturbingly cryptic on this issue. It says the company "usually keep[s] a backup copy of the prior version [of updated profile information] for a reasonable period of time to enable reversion to the prior version of that information." Facebook declines to enumerate how many days (or centuries) constitute a "reasonable period of time." Facebook users do not have access to this information, so it's unclear who exactly would be doing the proposed "reversion."

How incredibly stupid can Mark Zuckerberg and his minions be? Why hasn't he fired his entire legal department? This one is worse than Beacon. Basically, if you interpret what they are doing, its insidious. It basically is removing all control you have over your profile - or, in other words, what you care to record of your life online. So that if YOU decide that YOU don't want to be a member of Facebook - fine, as far as Facebook is concerned. THEY still will own YOUR profile. If YOU decide that YOU made a mistake and revealed something YOU shouldn't have or needed to get past something that YOU had done and recorded, that's fine as far as Facebook is concerned. THEY will still own YOUR history. One of the key psychological benefits of a social network is not just the peer-to-peer communications that it fosters. It is CONTROL of the life that is being exposed by the owner of that life. That is translated to a profile when it comes to a social network and the actions on that profile. What makes Facebook particularly nasty here is that it says to the "friend" - "your ownership is an illusion. Once you commit - you commit. And then, heh, heh, heh, the data is MINE, MINE I tell you. MINE!! I AM FACEBOOK - LORD OF THIS UNIVERSE - MASTER OF THIS SOCIAL DOMAIN." OR to put it in little kids terms: What's mine is mine. And what's yours is mine. Some of this is understandable - though not forgivable. They want Facebook to be a business, not a hangout, and thus they treat the profiles as assets. This is no different on the surface of it than the salesperson who is treating their contact database as their asset and leverage (in their case, to protect their livelihood). But there is a different protocol that governs social networks. Peer-to-peer trust is one major facet of that governance. As a social network there are three things that have to be remembered at all times:

1. The social network is responsible for providing a reasonable expectation of privacy for each and every member of the network. That means that the individual who provides the profile retains ownership of the profile and is, in effect, licensing the use of that profile in a limited way.
2. That the terms of the "license" must be mutually agreeable and always transparent. There are no hidden or undue uses of the profile by the social network.
3. The social network is must do what it has to so that it is trusted AS A PEER by the individual members of the social network. This one is the most important and is critical to all businesses now. I'll be elaborating on this in future entries. For now, suffice to say, the social network can't be seen as an abstract entity by the individual members. It MUST be seen as a "trusted peer" to be successful.

Facebook is failing miserably at all of these and continues to make the kind of mistakes that will doom it in time to a footnote in the history of the social changes that have been roiling the world of human institutions in the last several years. That's sad. Look, I still like Facebook. I'll maintain my profile and you can see my Likenesses from PG to R rated. You can see who I'm poking (in a "good for all audiences" kind of way). You can read my conversations, see what other applications I use and what's going on with me from day to day. I have nearly 400 friends on Facebook and will keep growing that friends group. But at this point, I'll have a good time and put it to good use until it finally succumbs to the pressures of Google's OpenSocial API, Google's Social Graph API, some other social network that does get this and its own incredibly stupid mistakes - especially the ones that violate both public and private trust. In the meantime, I'll talk to my trusted peers on Facebook, as well as LinkedIn and Plaxo. But I have to say - Facebook, I don't trust YOU.

Comments

[Darayush]

Interesting .. was unaware Facebook was doing this till I read your post. I guess any network that lacks trust can come down very quickly. Now let me preface this by saying I dont work at FB nor am I a very big FB fan. However I can see a couple of reasons on why FB might have had this policy in its early days and might have let it go untended and its now a major area of concern.
I know some social networking sites in their very early days used to keep backups of everything including profiles in case some malicious user hijacked another users account and went in and deleted everything. If the original user came back with sufficient legal proof's from the "real" world that it was indeed their own account then some SN sites would restore their account.
The other situation might be that of an offender. What if someone uses a fake or made up FB profile solicits users as friends performs some crime online or offline and then erases their online presence by deleting their data/profile etc. How do law agencies track down in those cases.
Anyways I do completely agree with the 3 guidelines you've laid out above and feel that Social Networks are exploiting these situations as most users had not bothered about these kinds of things when they signed up a couple of years back and are now growing up to its consequences.
I'm guessing FB should provide more concrete guidelines in their TOI about use of profile info.
Just shows FB is growing but maybe not growing up fast enough.

[Steve]

Paul--A great posting. Yes indeed, FB has come under increasing scrutiny not just by the Post, but by the NY Times as well. I'm wondering if issues like this will increasingly lead to burnout by business professional users. I just read a rather negative post on FB on pcmagazine.com, as well as an article in businessweek.com questioning whether users will tire of sites myspace and FB due to the growing plethora of banner ads. Most importantly, that "beacon" of statistical signficance -- my wife -- told me recently that folks she knows are moving off of FB. Now, in relation to privacy concerns, they're not trying to delete their profiles. Rather, their eyeballs simply aren't going to FB any longer.....Damn, why am I writing all this on YOUR blog when I should be blogging about it? It's time to plagiarize myself!

[Paul Sweeney]

Paul, this is because FB operates as per Microsoft. www.bubblegeneration.com has being going on about this for months, and ultimately, Umair reckons that FB is incapable of acting in any other way, because this is how their DNA works. Google API is going to eat FB lunch at some stage. Why? Wider and Better Data set. Pure and Simple.

[Dale Wolf]

Paul

Thanks for this post. I was totally in the dark on Facebook's policy and used your post in one of mind on customer experience. Nothing in this world, nothing can rebuild trust once it is lost.

Dale Wolf www.perfectcem.com