The Deal With Facebook

For starters, let me tell you about my experience with Facebook. I heard Leo Laporte talking about Facebook on one of his many TWiT “netcasts” several years ago. Like many other much-hyped Web 2.0 offerings, it reached a point where one could call it the “buzz on the net,” meaning that everyone was talking about it. When this happens you will get your fill of it on TWiT, especially if you listen to more than one of its shows. One of Leo’s cohorts— it may have been Amber MacArthur in this case—said something to the effect that as a consultant she felt compelled to be on Facebook if for no other reason than to be knowledgeable about it.

As an IT pro for over 25 years who performed consulting services the last time I lived in the Bay area of California, I could certainly identify with needing to be on the bleeding edge of wuzhatnin online. So while the conversation was still ongoing in the netcast in question, I typed www.facebook.com into my browser and hit enter. What I got for my effort was the online version of a brick wall. At the time that I tried this, Facebook had absolutely nothing for non-members, not even a walk-through, a list of features, or an about page.

I will admit, this prompt to create an account was compelling. An excruciatingly enticing case was made for you to check it out by everyone you heard talking about it. Once you actually got the impetus to navigate there, you were determined to check it out just to see what everyone else was talking about. Unlike 99.9% of the Internet, unless you join they got nothin’ for ya—and I mean NOTHIN’. What Facebook represented for each person at this point was a Pandora’s box. I would love to see statistics on how many people approached this rabbit hole and refused to jump in.

This is where I part company with the majority of humanity if you believe Facebook because I closed the tab and never visited Facebook again. I think Facebook had only a few million users at this point and it occurred to me that the number of people who would sign up just to see what it looked like was gigantic and each new profile was helping Facebook add to its value at an extremely rapid pace. Call me old-fashioned but I believe that an enterprise should be willing to earn my business first by demonstrating what my investment of time will provide me, not by making me earn the right to see what it can do for me. Essentially, this business model creeped me out so I went elsewhere.

Being big into tech, especially online tech, I have watched Facebook’s rise with fascination. When I began seeing sites like the Huffington Post offer to let people sign in with Facebook Connect, I knew this would be trouble eventually as more and more people and websites, grew to depend on it. Watching the unfolding privacy nightmare has been nothing short of amusing. Hearing people gripe about privacy is as laughable to me as the iPhone users griping about iPhone restrictions because I don’t use products that I have to gripe about. But that’s just me. Long ago, probably in high school, I decided that existing in a crowd of one was perfectly acceptable. I guess Mom’s questioning if I would jump into the lake if everyone else was doing it, stuck. I mean, it made sense to me at some basic level and still does.

Facebook clearly wants to leverage its user’s personal data for profit. You can’t blame them. This is where most of the value is. Facebook reissues its privacy policy over and over giving itself more and more rights on how it can use the data. My friends who use Facebook tell me that many of their extended group of Facebook friends see a lot of things that they would prefer to restrict to a smaller set of friends, but that there are consequences that make this impractical. Also, that it is generally unclear how restrictions that they add will affect their overall experience. This is borne out in a recent graphic from a New York Times article.  This chart (shown below) shows the hierarchy of selections available to customize your privacy settings.  The point is that Facebook makes it purposefully difficult to set  preferences because they want your data to be public in order to market it to 3rd party companies, especially advertisers.

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The second chart shows a number of changes to its privacy policy and how it has increased in complexity in order to make understanding it more difficult.  If it seems like a lot to swallow, remember that’s the point.

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My friends on Facebook tell me that one of the most annoying features is that they constantly get messages that one of their friends is using a certain application or playing a game along with an invitation to try it. If they try it, the author of the application gets access to all of their private data. Most of them refuse such invitations because they have previously been used as vectors for viruses. Facebook has apparently taken steps to secure this vector as a virus carrier but it remains one of the most annoying features according to these users.

Despite the ability to opt out of these services, Facebook users continue to complain because of Facebook’s decision to make its most marketable (and compromising) “features” opt-out rather than opt-in. Essentially, this means that unless you say otherwise, you agree to participate and share your private data  as required by that feature.  This has led to a torrent of bad press of late. Some very damning articles have been written like Business Insider’s article entitled, “Facebook’s Open Disdain For Privacy“  and the Huffington Post’s “Delete Your Facebook Account…” about the coming, “Quit Facebook Day” on May 31st.  That’s just a drop in the bucket.  What’s worse is that a published set of text messages have come to light where Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg is said to have called the people trusting his company with their private data a bunch of “dumb fucks.” (Sorry, no bleeps here.  We’re all adults.)  And yes, those are in fact quotation marks.

I recently read the book, “No One Would Listen” by Harry Markopolos about the Bernie Madoff scandal.  You know, the same Bernie Madoff who stole upwards of $50 Billion from investors in a record-breaking Ponzi scheme.  It reminds me of all the people who asked me over the years if I was on Facebook.  When I told them that I had a bad feeling about it, most people just chuckled and said I was overreacting and questioned:  If it was dangerous, why would so many people use it?  Yea, that’s exactly what they said about Madoff.  So I’ve advised people for at least 3 years to be careful what they put on Facebook and to not be surprised if it is eventually made public but of course, “No one would listen.”  These people jumped right into that lake that our Moms warned us about and are now trying to avoid the sharks that we now know are in there.  Nevertheless, they depend on Facebook and are loath to depart from it.

Jason Calacanis, the Internet personality and entrepreneur who has disparaged Zuckerberg from time to time was challenged by Leo Laporte to join him in deleting his account on live video in last week’s TWiT (This Week In Tech) in a discussion of Facebook that begins at 43:11 into the clip.  He ignored the question the first few times it was asked but then finally responded with a quote from Ralph Kramden, “Hummina hummina.”  Then he said that he needed his account for communication with business contacts and so forth.

This lack of conviction is the going trend.  Today, Leo posted a link to a Google Buzz discussion thread where he wrote about Facebook blocking the account of a radio station in Texas that discussed Facebook’s privacy policy on the air. In one response to this post, a woman named Susanne said tellingly, that she would quit Facebook if not for the fact that it was the way that she communicated with all her friends and relatives.  I replied with this question, “What if your relatives are on Facebook because that’s where YOU are?”  That’s been Facebook’s lure all along:  You’ve got to be there because that’s where everyone else is.  Yea, “there” in this case means, swimming in a lake called Facebook.

Everyone has a feeble excuse why they should overlook Facebook’s determinedness to leverage user’s supposedly private data for profit.  A better strategy is to make sure before jumping into a rabbit hole, that there is nothing in there but rabbits.  If one finds afterward that there are predators lurking about, one has no one to blame but oneself.

Still, how one responds after such knowledge has been gained says everything about how one adheres to one’s own principles.  Do you vote with your feet or double down on those blinders?  If the latter, I recommend a set of oars.

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