The Charleston Observer
a CharlestonToday.net blog
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facebook is camouflaging its transparency
January 26th, 2011
On January 17, the facebook developer blog announced that it is providing a way for facebook advertising clients to access our phone number and address from our contact information in facebook. Here’s the announcement:Improvements to Permissions for Address and Mobile Number
By Douglas Purdy – Monday, January 17, 2011 at 11:25pmOn Friday, we expanded the information you are able to share with external websites and applications to include your address and mobile number. With this change, you could, for example, easily share your address and mobile phone with a shopping site to streamline the checkout process, or sign up for up-to-the-minute alerts on special deals directly to your mobile phone.
As with the other information you share through our permissions process, you need to explicitly choose to share this data before any application or website can access it, and you can not share your friends’ address or mobile number with applications. Also, like other data you make available to third party apps and websites, you can always clearly see and control the ways your information is being used in the Application Dashboard.
Over the weekend, we got some useful feedback that we could make people more clearly aware of when they are granting access to this data. We agree, and we are making changes to help ensure you only share this information when you intend to do so. We’ll be working to launch these updates as soon as possible, and will be temporarily disabling this feature until those changes are ready. We look forward to re-enabling this improved feature in the next few weeks.
It sounds so positive, and it could have some positive effect—if you want it to. But it’s a big if because the facebook team has buried our control settings in an underground maze that is sure to foil the average online user. And they’ve made it sound like a new benefit to users whereas it is clearly a plus for advertisers.
Why not be completely transparent about this option, our choice, and especially our ability to make it? After all, that is what founder Mark Zuckerberg has championed from the beginning and continues to espouse: that full transparency is central to what makes facebook work for all of its (soon to be 1 billion) global users. Meanwhile, the company contradicts itself with what is essentially deception by purposely making it hard to adjust (and understand) personal control settings in one easy place.
In response, I replied with this comment to the developer blog, and sent a copy to Mark Zuckerberg, though I am dubious about it reaching him.
Dear Mark:
It is truly incredible what you have accomplished with facebook, and it would be a pity to see it implode as a result of it turning against its own impetus: to enable people to FREELY communicate with each other in a way and on a global scale never before possible.
You have spoken repeatedly about transparency and the need for everyone to move more in this direction. You keep pushing the envelope in the direction of making (sometimes more than “helping”) that happen. And you have been able to do it by virtue of the power you wield with facebook. It is a tremendous power and, I agree, a tremendous opportunity.
As I am sure you also know, it is a tremendous responsibility with enormous implications. Which means that if your position starts to appear dictatorial or monopolistic, the tower could crumble and facebook’s reputation (“trust”) would be tarnished forever in history.
If you still honestly feel that transparency is the engine that can drive us to better communication, then you need to practice it and above all demonstrate it to users, not just talk about it philosophically. It defeats your purpose to impose transparency on others and then do the opposite yourself on the other side of the fence. This is it how it comes across when you create an underground maze that we must traverse to adjust our privacy and security settings—settings that are purposely made hard to get to, understand, and change. And settings that we can’t even be sure will really do for us what they claim.
The best advance you can make into the thicket of transparency is to openly (easily) allow users to adjust their settings, with clear statements about changes you make. The fact is that only a small percentage of users will want that control anyway; there will still be hundreds of millions of users that willy-nilly remain transparent. Your “other” clients, the advertisers (who appear more and more to be your first concern) will still have a treasure trove of data to pick from. But being fully transparent to the smaller percentage will make all the difference—because they are more vocal and will lead the rest. Undermine them and you undermine Facebook at its core, which is about “following.”
Everywhere you look now—from the financial industry, to our political leadership, to the amount of potato chips in a bag packed mostly with air—we are being deceived. In many ways, Facebook is a tool for this to change. How incredible.
Please dig into yourself again and make Facebook itself fully transparent so that it can achieve the still unknown heights of effectiveness that it might reach. If you don’t, someone else will surely build a “clean” tool based on your model and everyone will jump to it even faster than they jumped onto facebook. You will in fact be pushing them to make that jump.
Please, Mark. Please do not deceive us. There’s nothing we hate more and nothing that destroys communication more.
Note: after posting this, I came across this article from tech journalist David Kirkpatrick, author of The Facebook Effect.
