Ask HN: Are you with me? Leaving Facebook.
I'll be deactivating my Facebook account (tainting what I need to) and removing as much information there as possible within the week.
I'm not a hardcore privacy advocate, but I joined Facebook with the understanding that some of what data placed there would stay private. That is what we agreed to.
Facebook has repeatedly violated that trust.
141 comments
[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 129 ms ] threadYes, privacy is important. However, the only information that I've ever put on Facebook is information that I'd want everyone else to know. That's why I have a Facebook; to give people who don't know me an idea of who I am and what I'm like, and get a little bit of personal branding out there. For instance, there's at least one little portion of my life that I don't want to be broadcast out to everyone, so it's conspicuously missing.
I don't feel that Facebook told anyone that their data would be private. Maybe I'm just naïve, or a little bit of an exhibitionist.
But I'm often more worried about what my friends do that can effect the amount of information out there, about me. Facebook makes it easy to inadvertently share information about your friends. That, I don't like.
I'd love a replacement Facebook, one that is a little bit like Facebook used to be: relatively simple, unintrusive and benign. I want fine-grained control over what I can share, and not to have to worry about what will be given away. Or at least know upfront what will be. Opting IN to things is great.
Basically, Facebook has treated me (and those who feel similarly) like crap.
For that matter, this could happen anywhere on the Internet. Someone could write a blog post about you, or tweet about you, or any number of ways to publish information about others. The web is increasingly becoming read/write, and Facebook privacy settings aren't going to change that.
With the recent app privacy changes, all they have to do is use an app. The programmer can take care of the rest. Different level altogether.
I'm not sure if this will actually be the case, there could be a backlash against this (much like the backlash against the sexual revolution of the 60s/70s) or simply that "oversharing" will be done by a section of society while the rest continue to judge as we do today.
I have unfettered access to a rather large social graph so I should make some studies of this.
Anyone know some good reading on the subject to get me started?
If you find any other people discussing this, I'd be interested in reading, too.
Edit: It's kind of funny reading old things you've written. At the time, I felt like I might have said "asshole" one too many times when writing this post, and now I _definitely_ feel that way. Oh well, I apologize for the moderately excessive profanity.
This was actually how Facebook got popular in the first place. The whole point was that it was more private than the other social networks out there. As the site grew, one of its big selling points was its privacy control panel, which gave you granular control over how your content was shared.
Perhaps the perception has changed in the last year or two, but I think a lot of people signed up under the impression that Facebook is a safe/private site.
Secondly, I don't think that Facebook's privacy controls were ever a big selling point. The fact that it was for cool kids combined with the fact that all of your friends were on it was a huge selling point. Yes, people use the privacy controls, but never the fine grained stuff, it's all "don't show info to people that aren't my friends."
Or maybe my perception was skewed. Facebook came to my school in September of my freshman year of college, so I'm literally in the exact cohort that grew up with it.
Exactly. People didn't care much about the granular stuff, just that only their friends could see what they were posting. With the changes FB has made to its settings (namely, the 'Everyone' setting that is now the default), that's no longer true.
For what it's worth, I was in the exact same group as you — Facebook came out while I was in college and I joined the day it came to my school. Exclusivity definitely played a part in helping it catch on, but I think Facebook's reputation as a "safe" site is what helped it make the jump from high school/college kids to everyone else.
That's another thing, though; we've both really only got data from our own anecdotal experiences and interpretation of our friends' descriptions of what makes Facebook valuable to them. Who knows, maybe we're both outliers, and the vast majority of Facebook's users use their ACL based system heavily.
And most of my friends don't actively use it, though most of us at least have a FaceBook account. I find that I'm getting bombarded by sheep from weak connections that aren't really doing anything with their lives, while most of the people that I actually care about, I either see in person or they have busy lives and don't spend much time on FaceBook either.
I don't actually log on to Facebook that much either. I do have my Twitter hooked up to post status updates, and I generally get as much engagement as I do on Twitter itself, so I log in to continue discussions with people commenting on my status. But that's about it.
If you're getting bombarded by sheep, try clicking the 'block updates from this application' button next time. I've been happily bullshit-notification free for a while now.
Facebook is a mild convenience to me, like finding a good time to make an international call was a mild inconvenience. Once it becomes a mild inconvenience, facebook will be long gone.
Congratulations, you already demonstrated your agreement with the author and effectively stopped using Facebook then.
The whole point of Facebook is to enable a you to form a private community of friends that share things. If you've degraded that to "only what I will share with everyone in the universe" then you've essentially withdrawn from Facebook already.
Maybe it's different for people with 300 or 600 friends.
I'd guess the market is ripe for a fb-type site that, for lack of a better phrase, isn't evil. And doesn't have a horrible ux.
Should: - Be able to export all friend/contact information anytime. CSV is fine.
- Be able to _easily_ block/remove applications & notifications. It's fine people can create "which star trek appliance are you?" quizzes, but let's make it _easy_ for these to be removed from my feed if I don't want to see them.
- Maybe have a more twitter style follow where it does not need to be a mutual follow. Obviously less information is shared if I don't follow back; etc. Just pondering this, it might or might not be better.
I actually don't think there's _that_ many things. There are a few key things that, if done right, would make it a better facebook. I'm just stabbing in the dark though.
Can this post be considered a YC application? ;-)
Obviously this would make users happy but not app makers, because the way it currently works is free (obnoxious) advertising for them.
The mixed-access to updates based on bi- or unidirectional association is one of the very nice things about LiveJournal's social scheme. I knew a few people who use FaceBook for one level of communication and retain their LiveJournal accounts for another, because of this.
And those you 1) opt-in for 2) pay for.
There's a long list I have, but that's a startup for another day. (Or for a time a month from now... when school lets out.)
2: I want this without my friends and family having to learn about OpenID or having to sign up for a new account somewhere. (I don't know how to do this, I am just saying what I want. Posterous got this part right.)
3: I want to know that the investment I'm making in generating content will last. This means I need to trust that the host of my content is not going to disappear, or get bought and change its behavior radically. Alternatively, it means that I am given the ability to migrate my content to a well-behaved, API-implementing host elsewhere (including, possibly, on my own server).
Nothing I know of addresses this set of wants elegantly. Maybe because monetizing the social graph requires as much transparency from the participants as possible, at least according to current thinking. But I feel that eventually, what 'sharing on the web' means will inevitably evolve to accommodate this set of wants.
If Facebook decided to be less evil they could do ACLs-meet-web pretty easily, since they already have such a huge installed user base. In fact, they may have already done this a long time ago for all I know; back when I canceled my account, they did not have this capability.
1. allow you to fine-tune who sees what, 2. do not require extra accounts (save comment systems, etc.), 3. are not tied to any one provider or company and thus will last for a long time.
Even if it did, your assertion is like equating assembly to a high level language. Just because you theoretically can do anything in assembly that you can in a high level language doesn't mean you would want to. I am trying to specify a set of attributes for a non-existent tool that would let me more fluidly publish what I write and create.
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edit: if anybody reading this would care to explain why I am getting downvoted & the parent is getting upvoted so much, I would appreciate it.
Websites like Facebook and Myspace are shunning the simple advertisement model. Selling private data will become the new standard. A website similar to scope and feature like Facebook will probably not be able to sustain a positive cash flow or break even without selling people's data. UNLESS...they cut features like photo storage, or make a technological breakthrough.
They are making ~$2/user/year (not including expenses). Since it recently supposedly became cash-flow positive, it would be reasonable to assume that the expenses are also around ~$2/user.
The question then becomes, how much of this $2 is slashed off when you decide to not sell private data? You only have to look at the cost of conventional CPM ads (usually less than $0.01 per impression) and multiply it by how many times a Facebook user opens Facebook each year. My bet is that it is far less than 365/2 since Facebook claims 50% of "active" users login every day.
? Every one of my facebook pages (feed and profile) always has two or three prominent ads over on the right.
As opposed to just regular ads.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook#Beacon
The prime example that resulted in a lawsuit settlement. I mean really? Opt-in to reveal your purchasing and browsing habits with selected companies and then spam your friends?
http://gawker.com/5426176/facebooks-great-betrayal
Another opt-in that is equivalent to Facebook buying web coverage at the expense of user privacy.
http://gigaom.com/2010/04/22/facebooks-instant-personalizati...
These websites are able to scrape your data to provide you a "personal" experience. Another opt-in. I'm not sure if FB is selling this api, but I'm willing to bet its a certainty.
These might not literally be bundling up personal information and selling it outright, but given the track record here, I wouldn't be surprised if they did another "opt-in".
None of these programs involved facebook giving user data to advertisers. Even the dreaded Beacon was strictly one-way: it allowed sites elsewhere on the Web to publish to facebook, not vice versa.
Out of curiosity, do you hold Google's AdSense up to similar levels of scrutiny? You're aware that a little pixel is on about 70% of the web by hits, piping your interests, proclivities, and browsing history to Google advertisers can target you? Or is it not evil when Google does it?
Your argument is analogous to saying Microsoft didn't really have a monopoly because 3% of computers used Linux and OSX. Plus, how does F8 instant personalization work? I doubt it is solely based on a 1 pixel tracking image.
And I do hold up AdSense to the same level of scrutiny. While it also has privacy issues, it is not of the same level. It does not force browsers to become advertisers to their friends, revealing their purchasing and browsing habits. Your friends do not know that you visited a certain website or bought a certain product and can link you by your name, age, friends, and likes/dislikes and organizations you belong to.
That is the sole reason why people think Facebook can beat Google.
You want to make some sort create some sort of moral equivalence between literally selling user data and changing user privacy defaults. Maybe there is some moral equivalent, but I don't think so.
In any case, the way you made your case is by lying. An anti-US activist might want to claim a moral equivalence between the casualties of the Iraq war and mass executions. But, to say that the US executed 100k Iraqis is lying. That is an analogous to your argument.
A more apt analogy using your theme would be this: Saddam Hussein didn't kill anyone, his soldiers did. Only a pedant would be worried about the literal meaning without looking at the big picture.
Google groups is broken for some people, and I'd stay away from using it as a building block. Lots of people have negative opinions about Wave, me included. I don't even know if Buzz would help in any of this, the launch was so botched I never looked at it; people have told me it wouldn't work well for anything like this.
Posterous or Tumblr could do it too. Google doesn't seem to be very motivated in integrating their various acquired apps; maybe this would be that motivation. Or maybe Posterous or Tumblr might find some motivation in this.
It need not, maybe should not, and probably could not compete with Facebook. That's not a reason to not do it. Jones Soda does pretty well, yet I doubt if they think of themselves as a Coca Cola killer.
Whether Google or someone else does it, I'd like:
GENERAL
- Total control. I don't want to be a control freak, I want to be a control super freak. I decide exactly what is private, shared and public. Everything that can be shared in any way should be obvious, and the settings interface for controlling privacy should be very obvious in: a) what setting controls what feature, b) what feature is controlled by what setting. If you have to guess how to change a feature's exposure, or what feature a setting controls, then you don't have control.
- Long-lived settings. New features should never expose tomorrow what was not exposed yesterday. That's just so disrespectful on facebook's part.
- New features should begin with the most restrictive privacy settings.
- No apps or third parties. Make your money through advertising or paid features. If you're Google then you already have great advertising revenue and this just ties into it.
- No friend can expose anything of mine to any greater degree than I have explicitly exposed it.
DISCOVERABILITY
- If I want to be invisible at any level, then I should be invisible as long as the rivers run and the winds blow, until I change it.
Invisibility includes:
EXPOSURE- I control what parts of my data are exposed, and how far out. This is both independent of discoverability and cooperative with it. For example, no matter how far out I might expose a photo album, it can't be exposed farther out than my discoverability. On the other hand no object needs to be as exposed as my maximum discoverability.
If I'm invisibile outside the system, then I can't set the exposure of a photo album to outside the system. If I need a photo album or something else to be exposed farther out than my discoverability, then I'd need to create that album outside the system (say, as a picassa album in a different, public account). I might be able to link to such an album from inside (and that link would have the same discoverability and exposure protections as any other object).
FUNCTIONS
- Discoverability. Anyone can discover me, as long as they're within one of my discoverability spheres. If I've set my discoverability to "world" then you can find me through search or browse. You can send a message to me if I've enabled that (with enough hurdles to discourage spam). If you're a member of the system you can request to friend me.
If my discoverability is more restrictive, then you might only be able to discover me if you're already a member. Or you might be able to discover me only if you're a member of one of my friends' other groups.
- Exposure. Objects that you post or share have a settable exposure level. Posting objects to a group gives those objects the exposure that you previously associated with that group.
- Chat.
...
But there is a tradeoff between privacy and network effects. The network relies on its members connecting and conversing; that's how the network derives its value. Facebook's network is valuable because it is the de facto online identity for many millions of people. And to engender and promote network effects, Facebook must necessarily expose information about you to other users. How else would anyone connect with you?
Sure, it'd be nice for you to make yourself invisible at a moment's notice. But it's a terrible user experience for anyone trying to find or converse with you.
As for discoverability vs invisibility, you're right, discoverable is more valuable to the network. I think most people would opt for more discoverability than invisibility, but invisibility is a logical setting among a level of settings. And it allows a small group of people who are only interested in staying connected with each other to do only that.
It's all about the integrity of the core feature set, and avoiding future, short-term successes that erode into it. Ironically, one only really notices the erosions (which, as with Apple and Goldman, are really not unique within their industry) after a certain amount of success.
Plausible deniability isn't that tricky, it mostly requires careful use of protocols at design phase and there is OTR to borrow.
With AJAX or dynamic JS scripts updates should be fast. The intersection of updates of contacts could be done in a single API call with multiple parameters (server-side intersection of data.) Or more scalable but a bit slower by doing multiple calls to separate server clusters (could even be calls to fetch plain files on CDN containing latest updates, aka "the wall".)
I've played a bit with zero-knowledge technologies (similar to Clipperz) and I think it's very doable. The big problem problem lies on images and video. Last year I played with HTML5/canvas with encryption but the CPU and delay is prohibitive since it requires to work on decompressed images pixel-by-pixel.
It would be nice if the major browsers started giving encryption and compression primitives to JS. And even nicer if there was an API to manage images, audio and video.
Chrome NaCl looks also very promising for this kind of disruptive technology.
Of course, the non technical problems of getting traction with users and making it commercially viable are still there just like in any other kind of social network service.
* Sharing information: Easy!
* Removing information: Okay, not _too_ hard, but not as easy as sharing it!
* Adding applications/pages: Easy!
* Removing applications: Good luck doing it in less that four clicks, even assuming you know where to look!
* Unliking pages: Where the heck... oh, there it is in little tiny letters way down the left column...
And so on.
I'm not sure how to properly align those incentives, but you can't really blame them.
But I'm not necessarily talking about walling myself off; it should be _just as simple_ to remove an application as to add it.
Anyways, you're right, but still; if they're going to continue pursuing their own incentives and not their users, I predict they'll (eventually) lose their users.
Winston Jonathan Smith -> W.J. Smith
01/03/1980 -> 01/01/1950 (this doesn't even have to be visible)
and not posting any sensitive information on there?
I had it for a long time, and I just felt like it was keeping the most brain dead relationships barely alive. I was constantly seeing people in real life and saying, "oh yeah, I read that on facebook." I didn't like that, and the privacy concerns were just the last straw.
So yeah, I'm with you.
I considered committing Facebook suicide but decided against it for the primary reason that many casual friends I'm able to keep in touch with/share media with that would normally be quite difficult.
I have my privacy settings locked down, all 3rd party apps removed, and I never...ever say anything on Facebook that I would encrypt/sign in email.
I'm sure people had a similar upset over the postal service when it was first suggested! It has more to do with being mindful of your mouth and being aware of the options you have as an individual for privacy (GnuPG).
http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2010/04/facebook-timeline/ http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2010/04/facebook-further-reduce...
or OpenSocial: http://www.opensocial.org/
Not that OpenSocial took off or anything. And I'm not that confident in OpenLike, either.
First of all, there is a basic protocol that any social application can adopt to. It basically consists of a few URIs like /user/login/, /user/register/, etc.
Secondly, since "virality" is key in getting something like this implemented, I propose that there is a form of global identity database that is accessible by anyone. Only email, user_id (depends on provider), and provider_id information is stored (I'll get to the provider bit in a second). Any identifying information is hashed to protect private information. The issue is making this database publicly run (similarly to Bittorrent) and being able to publish the hashing algorithm used. It would obviously have to be more complex than MD5 or SHA1.
Thirdly, there are what I call "providers". Providers are basically apps like Facebook and Twitter. They are capable of deciding what information is public. There aren't any privacy "settings" for each provider. Each provider's privacy policy is static and will not change. I.e. provider A will display to the world your SS#, name, and phone number, whereas provider B will display just your name. This is done to eliminate any gray areas.
Thirdly, the idea of "notifications" and connections. Connections are one-way (like Twitter). So, you might be wondering, how do you connect between two "social networks"? You search for the person you're looking for by email and are given their user_id and provider_id. Your provider then has all it needs to connect with this person (it sends a message to the friend's provider to a notification endpoint, and the friend's provider then can do whatever it wants with that information).
Notifications consist of updates, connections made, and other things (possibilities are endless).
Rules:
1) Users can only use one provider at any given time.
2) Users can choose to delete their profiles on demand.
3) User data can be exported so that provider migration is quick and easy.
I should write a blog post about this. There's way more. I called it OpenConnection.
If you don't do either of those two things, you'll be fine. No need to dramatically or publicly terminate your account.
Incidentally, you can stop your friends posting to your wall, or commenting on any of your items, or even just block specific friends from commenting or posting.
If i really want to keep in touch with far-flung family, friends - i pick up the phone or drop an email. If they are important to me i will make the effort. I also don't find the need to advertise on a daily/hourly basis what i am doing or tell people about the cool car/bike/tv/ipod etc. i bought. May be its just not for people like me.
Things you suggest - picking up the phone, dropping an email - require 1-on-1 contact. I am limited in the amount of time I can devote to 1-on-1 contact.
But I can post on Facebook and people that know me but aren't necessarily people I want to devote a lot of 1-on-1 time to - more distant relatives, old friends, etc. - can see what I want to share. And I can skim my feed and see what they want to share.
The level of time and contact is proportional to the relationship. They're not my inner circle, they're outer circle. Facebook is the single best improvement to my "outer circle" relationships ever invented. For low effort, I get to have some contact instead of no contact.
For some people, Facebook is all about the time wasting activities, but that's not the core of the experience unless you make it so.
"It lets you keep updated on what your aquintances does on a daily basis". Not your good friends (because you call them). Not your collegagues (because you chat/mail them). But all those highschool and childhood friends you dont see on a day-day basis because they're in another country/region/world/whatever.
Now, I could argue that that information is quite, uninteresting, and in many ways, it is. It is however quite nice to know that if I want to reach those people, I can.
It's a great way to share photos. It's also an ad-hoc mailing list between you and your friends. Post what you want; it's literally up to you. I post photos and links to interesting stuff -- mostly nerdy but my friends aren't terribly surprised by that.
That's it. Seriously, it's not calling you at home and asking what you're doing every hour. You make it what you want.
People like to talk about their lives. You may not care, but it's no different than normal smalltalk.
It's not about keeping in touch. It's about hanging out and gossipping.
A more open, non-evil alternative would be cool, of course. But good luck rebuilding the whole social graph there. Almost anybody who has tried that has failed.
(I view this as somebody who follows the Facebook News Feed all the time, posts several times a day, and often participates in long discussion threads about news, politics etc. with my friends.)
Also: how confident are you that Facebook won't still be HUGE 10 years from now? Many smart people think FB will only expand in its importance on the web. Again, not saying it will be or that people shouldn't quit if it offends their sense of propriety, but I'd hate to reopen my account 5 years from now after publicly committing a principled FB suicide.
In fact, I would go as far as to say never put any critically sensitive information on the web.
As many have pointed out, this happens already in blogs and email, on twitter, in various forums, etc., and not joining facebook will do nothing to prevent it from happening on facebook.
But more importantly, if you don't want your friends doing X or Y to you on facebook, you have a very powerful method of ensuring that at your disposal: make it clear that you find this unacceptable when it happens. Over time, people get the message before making the mistake, and these expectations harden into social norms. Ultimately, relying on these social norms is much more robust than relying on technological solutions, in my opinion.
I read this a few days ago:
http://www.wired.com/vanish/2009/11/ff_vanish2/
Privacy is even more dead than I ever suspected.
This way, if any of them posts something stupid on your wall, only that subgroup will know about it.
Then, of course, you'd need an app that lets you post the same status update on all your accounts.
An incriminating picture was posted on facebook and he was forced to reveal his sexual orientation to all of us (well we kinda suspected anyway) before he was ready in a pretty awkward way. He had to do the same not that long after with his family and it didn't go well at all.
All because someone posted a picture on facebook that was up for less than 30 minutes. I put the blame mainly on the person who put up the picture, but still, he should have had control over this kind of thing.
Facebook isn't special; it's just a subset of the Internet. If the people at your college had had, say, a mailing list instead, and someone had sent that picture to it (thereby putting a separate, cacheable copy in every person's inbox), would you reason similarly that "he should have had control over this kind of thing"? Just because it's one website, not millions, doesn't mean that anything put onto it won't be leaked back out by bullies, trolls, rumor-mongers or busybodies. There's no such thing as privacy in a network where even a single person is less than 100% trustworthy, no matter the medium.
Agreed. The issue w/ Facebook is that these "identity collisions" (when an aspect of your identity is exposed to a group of your friends that formerly didn't know, i.e. parents find out you're gay) can happen accidentally far too easily.
In other words, it's not about maliciousness... and even if someone did want to spread information about you maliciously, it'd be a hell of a lot more challenging to do so over a mailing list (finding your boss', former co-workers', parents', siblings', friends', etc's email addresses vs tagging a photo or note).
You should be able to 'come out' if you are gay without that kind of nonsense, presumably you have enough to deal with in a situation like that and your family should be supportive.
Especially your family.
However, when my sister started scanning pictures of our childhood and posting them tagged as me, public for the world to see I started get uneasy. Nothing compromising or unusual in them but there's that part of me that wants a say as to when crap like that is posted online.
It turns out of course I can "hide" photos tagged of me by other people - but still... Despite having my account private, other people can post pictures and tag them as having me in them. Frustrating.
I view FaceBook as being purely frivolous, for casual interaction w friends & acquaintances, and treat it thus. There are other "social networking" sites (for instance, LinkedIn) for other types of (real/purposeful) networking.
It's fine. I have no interest in participating in an ad network, so I wiped out the rest (friends, photos, etc) and publicized alternate contact info. Gotta keep the account for some of my clients' Pages.
Facebook was great for me ca. 2004-5. Now its goals and policies are very different. Maybe more people will get shocked away when tagging + image recognition start imposing on their family photos.
Fuck Facebook
and for the more adventurous:
Fuck Apple