Facebook and Geeks

A number of leading bloggers have said that they’re deleting their Facebook profiles on account of its recent changes to the way it treats users’ privacy, reports Read/​Write Web. The changes have actually turned out worse than I reported a couple of weeks ago, when you could opt out of appearing on the new com­munity pages. Now, the only way you can opt out is to delete the inform­a­tion from your profile page.

Matt McKeon has created a great infographic to explain what is now auto­mat­ic­ally public for anyone using the default settings:

The blog­gerati are incensed. Jason Calacanis writes:

Over the past month, Mark Zuckerberg, the hottest new card player in town, has over­played his hand. Facebook is offi­cially “out,” as in uncool, amongst partners, parents and pundits all coming to the real­iz­a­tion that Zuckerberg and his company are–simply put–not trustworthy.

Video pod­caster Leo Laporte tweets:

OK @jason has con­vinced me. I’ve deleted my personal Facebook account. I will delete the rest tomorrow during TWiG… http://bit.ly/aEgNVj

Peter Rojas – founder of engadget and Gizmodo – follows suit:

Just deac­tiv­ated my Facebook account. […] You really don’t have control over your personal data and who it is shared with.

Geek opinion seems to be that the new social network Diaspora will offer users more respect and control. It is intended to run in a similar way to BitTorrent, with no central server and ‘friending’ equating to giving access to highly encrypted inform­a­tion on your own computer or hosted server space. It will be open-​​source and use open stand­ards. So better?

I can’t really buy that. It may be a better solution, tech­nic­ally and even morally, but my father-​​in-​​law and ninety-​​year-​​old aunt are on Facebook: they will not be installing open-​​source software on their own server space. Facebook is the social network where I can com­mu­nicate with non-​​geeks. (BTW, the non-​​geeks in my life are con­sid­er­ably more cautious than a lot of geeks about privacy online – very few of them have opted for public profiles). What’s more, on a tech­nical level, Facebook already supports a raft of open stand­ards such as OAuth and Open Graph Protocol as well as its Open APIs for creating third-​​party applic­a­tions. If they saw demand, I’m sure they’d add more. I’d suggest that Facebook app vendors might think about creating services around privacy — ‘My Private Photos’, ‘Private Wall’, that sort of thing.

I’m not sug­gesting that the distress that’s been reported over declining privacy is a storm in a teacup. It’s not. But ulti­mately, the age-​​old advice that anything you write on the Web is in the public domain, so think before you post, remains a better solution than some kind of exodus to unknown and untried new lands. If one thing will persuade Facebook that it’s made the wrong decision and so reverse recent decisions on privacy, it would be people using it less.

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