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During my usual breakfast internet browsing, this piece by Social Beat’s Kim-Mai Cutler caught my eye. In the piece, Cutler attempts to formulate a best-guess of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s position on privacy. Until Zuckerberg himself comes out with actual long-form comments on the issue, this is about the best we’ve got. And it’s not encouraging.

In fact, I would characterize his views (as articulated in the quotes Cutler pulls) as incredibly naive. Not everyone in the world means well, Mark. There’s a reason people value their privacy and dole out information about themselves only to people they trust. And it’s not because they lack integrity.

That said, Facebook isn’t completely open. But, extrapolating after seeing how we got here, you could very well put a “yet” after “open.” And that’s scary.

Especially for those of us who got into Facebook back in the old days.

I first heard about Facebook in 2004, when a friend of mine who was attending the University of Michigan told me about it. At that time, you had to be part of a school network and the list wasn’t very large. Eventually, I was able to submit information on my university to Facebook using a tool they had for adding to the list. In September 2005, Facebook opened to my campus.

At the time, your profile was by default only as public as your college campus or your friend group. Very few people (more likely, no one) could claim to be close friends with everyone on campus, so even this limited openness was, in hindsight, a privacy issue. But hey, we were college students and part of a network that was just for us (no school administrators in those heady early days).

Eventually, Facebook opened up to local, city-related networks. You could limit visibility on those networks to just friends who were from Grand Rapids, but not part of your school network, if you wanted. You could also allow your profile to be open to the local network, if you chose. If you weren’t careful, you could run the risk of a privacy issue, but no big deal.

If you’re one of Facebook’s oldtimers, you no doubt remember the uproar over the News Feed feature. I myself never got the outrage, because all it did was make the fact that your profile is open to all your friends a little more in-your-face than it had been previously. If anything, it was a great feature that made keeping up with people easier, especially during the hectic later years of college when physically spending time with friends became harder.

But the point of the News Feed-and I remember a statement by Facebook to this effect-was to keep you up-to-date on what your friends were doing. That was the whole point of Facebook, to allow for that sort of automated aggregation of activities and information that helped make organizing events and get-togethers easier on top of keeping in touch when coursework took friends on different roads. When I graduated, this was a huge help as people I knew and cared about scattered to their actual homes and future careers.

But notice words like “friends” and “people I cared about” in the previous paragraphs. These were people who I wanted to know my music tastes, what movies I enjoyed, what books I was reading. These were people I wanted to know what I was doing, what my political views were, how I felt about whatever topic you could name. Facebook provided the mechanism to supplement relationships with people I actually wanted to have relationships with.

Obviously, there are and were other methods, such as, you know, talking, or emailing or IMing or any number of other tools. Facebook was one of many. But one we entrusted with private details within what’s been called a closed garden.

Mark Zuckerberg is opening the garden. Whether driven by the call of advertising revenue or by an honest desire to change social norms about privacy, he’s breaching the contract under which I signed up for his service. To some degree, he has every right to do so. Under the terms of use agreement none of us ever read, perhaps he gave himself an out, a route to this point.

And to some degree, we put ourselves in this position by feeding Facebook our stuff. Remember, it’s an opt-in service. In that I agree with this sentiment. But there was once a dream that was Facebook. It’s a dream that’s fading further with every loosening of the covers on our privacy.

I guess it’s our fault for believing Facebook would live up to the responsibility it took on by creating that dream.

As a sort of post-script, I have to say I don’t know what the solution is. Zuckerberg and Facebook have us captive, having created a massive network that most people we know have joined. There is no clear alternative (assuming we can trust any alternative to do a better job with our information).

Some people feel angry enough to leave. Those of us on the fence, who would like to reap the benefits of easy contact with our friends and family over great distances despite the privacy concerns, are held there both by 1) the specter of a life without the crutch we now sorta need and 2) the herd of people who don’t care enough about the privacy concerns to force a change.

One promising solution may be Diaspora. You can read more about it here. Unfortunately, it will be some time before it’s available.

» This entry was posted on Friday, May 14th, 2010 at 7:14 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a comment, or trackback from your own site.