Facebook Furor: If you aren’t comfortable now, you shouldn’t have been comfortable before
Facebook has, apparently, erupted in furor over a set of changes launched yesterday which make it easier to keep track of changes in friends’ profiles.
I’ve received several invites to “Stop the New Facebook” and am at a loss as to what people are so up in arms about. All the new changes do is make it easier to see what has changed in friends’ profiles. They do not reveal any information that was previously inaccessible, they only make it more accessible.
Apparently many of my fellow facebookers were under the mistaken impression that what they posted on the Facebook or what groups they joined was somehow … private? I fail to see what has changed, save for the accessibility of the information, since now Facebook’s default interface keeps track of friends’ profile changes. Previously, a dedicated stalker could save Facebook pages to disk and then run diff on each one to see what had changed. The changes have always been there, they are just more accessible than before.
Why then this anger and sense of betrayal? Over what? A perceived violation of privacy? Did Facebook install spyware on a user’s computer, dig through the user’s e-mail and auto-post stuff to the user’s profile? No? All the new Facebook changes have done is make what was already there easier to see. Nothing has changed in terms of information availability, only the accessibility. If people aren’t comfortable having their information so easily available now, then they shouldn’t have been comfortable before — the fact that they didn’t have a problem with it before indicates they do not understand that once something is posted on the Internet, it is no longer private, even if it is posted in a registration-only student-only community such as Facebook.
There is no such thing as a “private area” on the Internet. Before you post something online, make sure you’re comfortable with everyone online seeing it and knowing about it. If you’re not comfortable, don’t post it. It’s really that simple.
You think your Facebook profile was secure before these changes? It wasn’t. There was nothing stopping a “friend” of yours from screenshotting your profile, or saving the page to his hard disk, or even going to some campus administrators, logging onto Facebook in front of them and showing them your profile. If there’s something you don’t want people to see, don’t put it online — ever. The entire point of social networking sites such as Facebook is social networking. Networking is about bringing disparate information sources together. The new facebook changes make this easier than before, but they reveal many people’s innate cognitive dissonance: they thought they were “safe” and these changes have shown that they were never safe in the first place.
I for one applaud the Facebook changes: it forces people to confront the reality that information on the Internet lives forever, and once it is shared with others, it is out of your control forever.
September 6th, 2006 at 10:33 am
You’re missing the point. There is a perceived value on data collection. That value is in the convenience. Facebook has added some data collection and made it super convenient to know way too much about my friends and acquaintences.
Let me start by refuting you on the black and white point. This new feature allows you to see new information. Before, I had no way of knowing what my friends were posting on other people’s walls unless I went to those other walls and looked for it. There used to be no realistic way to do that. I have over a hundred friends and I maybe look at 3 of their facebook pages on any sort of regular basis.
Now we can go into the gray area. I can use my brains to piece together clues that would have previously gone unnoticed. A friend just changed his status to single, looking for a relationship, and is posting on a lot of girls’ walls. Looks like he’s facebook dating to me. All those girls who look at him are going to be put on the defense almost immediately. “Oh he’s just talking to me and four other girls, is he fishing?”
I’m really not paying attention to people’s pages. I’m not running diff. My friends aren’t running diff. Most of my friends wouldn’t even know HOW to run diff. This information is now being thrust into my face. All of a sudden I know everything that everyone does on facebook. I feel like a god. How can I not read the little changes my friends are making to their profile to look more impressive? How can I not listen to the inside banter of two friends and jump to conclusions as to what they’re talking about?
You didn’t think this through, or you don’t have a lot of facebook friends. Your blog title should be changed to Facebook Fuhrer.
September 6th, 2006 at 11:04 am
Thanks for your comment. Let me see if I understand your perspective by way of analogy:
Suppose a university houses students in a dorm, and each dorm room has a whiteboard on its door that the resident can write on. You could not see the whiteboard unless you went to each person’s door and looked at the whiteboard. That is the old Facebook.
Now suppose all these whiteboards are now electronically wired: what is written there is automatically online, so you can see all the whiteboards at once, just by logging onto your computer. That is the new Facebook.
Is that an apt summary of your view?
There still is no “new information;” there is just increased accessibility of information.
There was nothing in old Facebook preventing someone from tracking every single change his or her friends made to their profiles: if a person was sufficiently technically skilled, they could do this, without his or her friends even knowing it.
In new facebook, it is no longer necessary to have technical skills: anyone can do it and everyone knows that anyone can do it. This is a good thing, because it adjusts the perception to correspond with the reality. Before the perception was changes weren’t noticeable: when in fact, they were. Now the reality of every change being noticeable has been made visible. Reality has not changed: only an incorrect perception has been corrected.
Facebook profiles have always been monitorable. Now this fact has been made clear, and people are troubled by it. To me, the only way people can be troubled by this is if they didn’t think facebook profiles were monitorable before — which is false.
Of course, an alternate perspective is to argue that Facebook profiles were _rarely_ monitored before, but now _everyone_ can monitor them. But if it is acceptable for a few people to monitor (without people’s knowledge) why is it wrong for everyone to montior (with people’s knowledge)?
To me, being able to keep track of people’s profile changes is pretty cool: I get to see what they’re up to and what’s new in their life. Most of my 500+ friends don’t have blogs or websites, and they often won’t reply to an e-mail if I send them one because they’re busy. Facebook is how I keep in touch, albeit a very weak definition of “in touch.” Making it easier for me to keep in touch and see what my friends are doing can only be a good thing, in my view.
Well what about the ability of opt out of being monitored? Should Facebook add an option for folks to opt out of their “keeping up-to-date” scheme? Well, to me it looks as if they will end up having to, considering how many folks are upset about this. But will people who opt-out still be monitorable? Yes, because Facebook is using protocols that can be automated and they can never exclude all forms of automation.
So to summarize, it seems people are complaining about something that has been true along; it just has been made easier now. But what does it matter if it’s been made easier if it was always possible? Either people didn’t have a problem with it being possible before or they didn’t know. Since it seems illogical that people didn’t have a problem with it then and do have a problem with it now this must mean that most people didn’t know it was possible before. So this change just illustrates that this possible, and lo and behold, people realize they don’t like it. Which is the point of my original post: that if you aren’t comfortable now, you shouldn’t have been comfortable before. Thus I hold that this is a good change, because it alerts people to the fact that if they post something on Facebook, it isn’t private at all. Now is Facebook at fault for misrepresenting the privacy of its database? Perhaps, but that’s another issue entirely, and one that is applicable before and after this change.
September 6th, 2006 at 11:32 am
Changes are trackable: everything on the Internet is trackable, whether you like it or not. It’s part of the nature of the Internet, and trying to make things on the Internet non-trackable is an expensive and ultimately futile exercise. If you don’t want something trackable you shouldn’t put it on the Internet.
A lot of people didn’t learn that lesson the first time around and now this Facebook change tracking system is making them learn it the second time: this is good. It is good for people to be aware of the reality in which they live and not live in a false fantasy world.
Note, in the Facebook Terms of Service
“By posting Member Content to any part of the Web site, you automatically grant, and you represent and warrant that you have the right to grant, to the Company an irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid, worldwide license (with the right to sublicense) to use, copy, perform, display, reformat, translate, excerpt (in whole or in part) and distribute such information and content and to prepare derivative works of, or incorporate into other works, such information and content, and to grant and authorize sublicenses of the foregoing.”
That ToS was updated February 27, 2006.
Everyone on Facebook has already legally agreed to the new Facebook changes. If they don’t actually agree, they should take Facebook’s own advice, from the next paragraph of the ToS:
“You may remove your Member Content from the Web site at any time. If you choose to remove your Member Content, the license granted above will automatically expire.”
September 6th, 2006 at 11:39 am
The difference between leaving the information and broadcasting it is paramount. Facebook is not just letting people see what you’ve been up to, it’s FORCING them to. I would relate it to a front door; any competent homeowner realizes that a locked door is little resistance to a determined thief. However, this does not mean the door is left completely opened or unguarded. How can we tell who, upon passing the door, might enter when otherwise they would continue on? I agree that information should be guarded, especially on the internet, but I disagree that the recent facebook changes are doing no harm.
At any rate, it’s a relief to know there are real discussions on the topic, rather than asinine “Facebook SUCKS” posts.
September 6th, 2006 at 11:41 am
The analogy is correct in a very limited case, that being someone who has a small amount of friends. If you have tons of friends, you’ll find the new electronic service easier to keep up on whiteboards than personally going and reading all 100 of them whenever you wish.
What I’m trying to say is, it is very likely that people have more facebook friends than they have dorm room door whiteboards. Plus everyone knows that dorm room whiteboards are just for drawing phalice on.
To complete the analogy, the electronic service would have to also list all edits similar to a wiki. If I erased one number from my door’s whiteboard (crap, I don’t want to leave my cell number up here) and put another one up, facebook would keep track of that and tell everyone. How can I supress that accident?
So what we’re finding again, is that the fundamental difference in our ways of thinking is you simply dismiss the “increased accessiblity of information” while I say that feature has a large enough value to make a big difference on the way people use facebook.
I’m not worried about people with a sufficient technically skilled background. If someone was sufficiently technically skilled they could probably break into my website and replace it with tubgirl. What I’m most interested in is the most common skillset of the users of a system. And I’d bet you that diff has no meaning at all to most of facebook’s users. This is ignoring the additional software you would need to write to automatically visit your friends’ pages every minute and run the diff. You’d need to do that to achieve the same effect as the new facebook features.
From my experience with software development, the solution is easy. If you’re implementing a feature that wasn’t there before, is now, and can touch a nerve (be it privacy, moral, or anything else), then you should have a boolean value in your settings to enable/disable the feature. This is especially true of web software that you can’t reject the latest version of and stick to the old version. It is not hard to add a flag to opt out of firing these events off to all your friends and I’d turn it off in a heartbeat.
Sure you can stalk me by spending your time on facebook.. Sure you can stalk me by building or buying software that scrapes the website. All those options cost time or money (interchangeable) and so you can expect the average joe to not pursue those options. But now this feature is free and readily available to all my friends who, as good natured as they may be, are human and therefore curious.
September 6th, 2006 at 11:43 am
A quick note about the if-you-don’t-like-it-leave-it mantra; Facebook is a valuable social tool. I’m not saying we have a right to it, but until there is a suitable alternative I fail to see anything wrong with being upset with the service.
September 6th, 2006 at 11:51 am
It’s an interesting difference between web and desktop software. When AIM released the steaming pile Triton, everyone rejected it and stuck with the old version. They had this option because it is software that needs to be downloaded.
Often instant proliferation of updates is heralded by web applications, but in this case we can see the downside of that benefit.
September 6th, 2006 at 12:04 pm
I agree that Facebook should add an opt-out of this feature, and I think they will end up adding one because of the tremendous uproar.
I just see adding the feature as a good thing, not necessarily for Facebook, but for people who need to realize that information on the Internet is uncontrollable. I personally like the feature and am completely comfortable with people seeing everything I’ve done on Facebook, because I don’t do anything on Facebook that I wouldn’t be comfortable with people knowing about in the first place. That’s largely because I am aware that nothing I do on Facebook is truly “private.”
If someone is unaware of this, however, they are in for a rude shock — either now, rather painlessly with this news feed, or later, when they get in trouble for a picture of them underage drinking that they posted that they thought was “safe.” The easy way out is don’t do anything that will get you in trouble; the slightly more reasonable version of that is don’t do anything that will you get in trouble when you can be tracked doing it.
Part of this unawareness might be Facebook’s own fault. Consider their Privacy Policy. It implies that Facebook’s privacy controls are absolute, when it’s pretty clear they’re not: all you have to do to prove that it is not absolute is invite a friend over who’s not on Facebook and then show them your computer screen when you’re on Facebook. Trivial.
Technology has all sorts of interesting implications for privacy. However, I don’t think that the Facebook situation is a violation of privacy because, well, people have already agreed to the Terms of Service, and what Facebook has done is entirely in Terms of Service that have been up for more a half a year, ample time for people to have read them, all the more so since they did click to agree them. I don’t know about you, but I read the ToS before I click agree on any service I sign up for, so I know what I’m getting into. This is not a case of Facebook doing something that people didn’t agree too! People that have a problem with this are somewhat self-contradictory (or negligent) because they have agreed to the ToS that enables Facebook to do what it is now doing.
All that said, I think Facebook will soon implement an opt-out, if only to quiet the uproar. I don’t think that doing so will fix the “root” of the problem: that people are unaware of the way the Internet works and will probably continue to shoot themselves in the foot with their ignorance. My fervent hope is that the situation will go a long way to rectify people’s ignorance, because informed Internet users can only be a good thing.
Finally, publicly announced (new Facebook) is no different from publicly available (old Facebook), at least in terms of information’s availablity. Security through obscurity is not security at all.
September 6th, 2006 at 12:24 pm
I agreed to facebook’s terms of service before the new feature was added. I will admit that while the terms of service do cover what they are doing, the wording scares me. Can facebook start selling t-shirts with my pictures on them or make stickers using quotes from my page?
It looks like the answer is yes, but that does not mean it is an ethical or morally responsible act. I think facebook’s monitoring feature needs to be looked at with the same scrutiny. This whole situation could end up being the minor leagues for a much bigger use of that term of service in the future. NOW are you scared?
September 6th, 2006 at 12:45 pm
“Finally, publicly announced (new Facebook) is no different from publicly available (old Facebook), at least in terms of information’s availablity. Security through obscurity is not security at all.”
I’m not sure how else to say it, but it IS security. I was secure because, on average, no one was going to know what I did. I was secure because, now that I knew people wouldn’t know, I could be confident they didn’t care. So long as they didn’t care, they would continue to not know. It’s a psychological sort of security that has already proven itself in the old facebook. I am careful with what information I leave on publicly available sites. This does not mean, however, that I want it to be compiled and analyzed. In the way I close my curtains at night, even while I’m just watching TV or eating, I enjoy the privacy of obscurity. I’m well aware that someone could peek through the gap in the cloth, but assured that, because they have no reason to, and because most people would feel guilty or awkward about spying, they will not. In short, I have the power to control what people see about myself because people are generally predictable and bound to societal mores.
September 6th, 2006 at 1:41 pm
Zing, I agree that security through obscurity provides the illusion of security, but I don’t feel it is actualized security. To use your example, closing the curtains is not security through obscurity: it is actual security. Leaving your curtains undrawn and hoping no one looks in: that is security through obscurity. The gap in your curtains is a flaw in the security mechanism you chose (curtains, in this case). And it isn’t just societal mores keeping folks from looking through that gap: if they want to look through that gap, they would need to trespass onto your property to do so.
The situation with the new Facebook is not one of a failure of security mechanism: there would be justifiable outroar if someone was able to hack the Facebook site and download everyone’s profiles without their permission.
The Internet is too young for there to be societal mores about it: observe wanton music downloading… most people would not feel guilty analyzing their friends profiles for changes: in fact that’s what they’re doing when they check their friend’s profiles.
The privacy of obscurity is an interesting concept that I think deserves more analysis, but I don’t think it applies in this case because of the consent given in the ToS :-/
Andrew, as for the legality of Facebook’s ToS or its ethical implications, well, investigating stuff like that is why I am going to law school :) I agree that it’s something we need to look at as a society in more detail, especially as the Internet becomes more and more a part of people’s daily lives. What rights do visitors have on the Internet?
September 6th, 2006 at 2:28 pm
I would counter that leaving one’s curtains open and hoping no-one looks is not obscurity, but instead allowing one’s neighbors to see you whether they have the inclination or not. After all, there is veritably no control as to where their glance falls. So, perhaps the analogy is more basically flawed; it certainly doesn’t need to be argued to this sort of point.
The best real life comparison I can currently create requires a little bit of reality stretching, but it is more apt. Let’s say that I install bumpy glass windows all over my house, of the same sort that one would find in a shower (I’m guessing there is a better name for it, but you should know what I mean). For the most part, people only get a vague picture of what I am doing inside my home. However, it is not physically impossible to create a lens that would negate the refraction from the glass and create a sharp image of my every move. I install and use these windows knowing that a person may use such a lens, but I’m satisfied because I am aware that most people will not. What Facebook is doing, however, is essentially giving each and every person on my street a pair of bumpy-glass-negating glasses. You can see why this would make me upset.
If I can conclude anything, it is that the new Facebook clearly forces (not just allows) more people to know more about me than what they knew before. If one was to look at my profile - to get my phone number or to leave a message, whatever the reason may be - one cannot help but notice my recent activity. And this is to speak nothing of the news feed on each users’s home page. Of course, legally there is nothing wrong with this; but I’m not talking in legal terms. I don’t know if one can even call it “security” because I am aware that a dedicated person can find out whatever they want. If a person wants to find who I’m talking to and about what, that is their own business and I’m fine with it; I too have nothing to hide. What I do not want is the sort of availability the recent changes have made.
Maybe we should just call this “obscurity through inconvenience”? After all, there is nothing wrong with wanting to be obscure, and the Facebook changes are certainly forcing the hand of those who are wont to be.
September 6th, 2006 at 2:33 pm
There’s a professor on my campus who believes that all security is simply through obscurity. Any system can be socially engineered and eventually you boil down to how much trust you want to place in the hardware manufacturers, driver writers, ethernet cables, etc.
It’s purposely ridiculous to illustrate a point. No system can be built completely secure, especially with a human factor on almost every component you place in the process. Obscurity is all you really have whether it be via curtains, math, or keys. The hard part is finding the right level of obscurity to minimize your risk.
If you’ve ever lived in the first floor of a brownstone in new york city, curtains are important. People don’t have to trespass to look into your window because they’re walking only a foot away from it. Whenever you’re close to an open window you probably look in. It’s probably guilt free as well. So will be all your new facebook snooping.
September 6th, 2006 at 2:50 pm
To me, nothing has changed in terms of how I use Facebook, except what I used to do is now easier.
Before, I would just click on a profile and look at it, and remember what I saw before and see what was new (based on memory). Now Facebook highlights it for me, and even puts it on my front page, so I don’t have to click on the profile in the first place.
I still get the exact same information, it’s just easier for me.
Fundamentally, it seems that people are complaining that their friends (not random other people, their friends) know what they put on their profiles. Isn’t that the entire point of Facebook? That your friends know what’s on your profile? What harm is there in making it easier for your friends to see what’s new with you?
The fundamental question I don’t understand is this:
If it’s so bad that your friends can now know what’s new with you, why did not bother you when your friends could see your profile (and from memory, or diff) see what was new that way? I can’t see how people can have a problem with the current system and not have had a problem with was there before. They are informationally equivalent. There is no new information, there is only meta-information being added: information about the information, if you will.
There are curtains on Facebook: folks who aren’t your friends can’t see your profile or changes to your profile, at least not via Facebook (other people can still show them, of course). There has never been any bumpy-glass on Facebook: it always been possible to get a precise, perfect view: both on old Facebook and new Facebook. The only difference is now that it’s easier. The view is the exact same as it has always been.
I guess that’s the fundamental point behind my entire post in the first place: If before it didn’t bother people that their friends could see their profiles, why does it bother them that their friends can see what’s changed in their profiles?
September 6th, 2006 at 4:49 pm
Here is a live counter of the number of people who have joined the “Students against Facebook News Feed” group on Facebook….. 300,000 and climbing
http://digg.com/tech_news/Facebook_Stalker_City_Includes_LIVE_Counter
December 11th, 2007 at 4:12 pm
[...] Back in September 2006, I defended Facebook’s mini-feed, with the tagline of “If you aren’t comfortable now, you shouldn’t have been comfortable before.” My logic there was that the mini-feed didn’t expose any information that wasn’t available before, it just made it far more accessible. I did find it bad marketing on Facebook’s part to launch it without even so much as an opt-out option available, but I figured they’d learn from that mistake in the future. Finally, I found it a touch ironic that all the “Stop the New Facebook” groups grew virally in large part thanks to the very mini-feed they were railing against. In the end, Facebook made it possible to opt-out and control what was posted in the mini-feed, restoring the option to maintain the security-through-obscurity regime that many of its users had accustomed themselves to. [...]