I wonder if this 'disturbance in the force' with regard to facebook is being felt only by us geeks or if regular people are starting to feel it too.
Has anyone heard something about Facebook and trust/privacy/openness from a non-geek in the recent past? Is this going mainstream or are we in a bubble?
If you haven't already noticed, early-adopting geeks drive adoption to the masses. They are an important part of the vetting process.
If you piss off that same crowd, sooner or later the ripple will be felt. Depending on the order of magnitude, it could very well turn into a tidal wave as it gains speed. Makes you wonder if hockey stick inversion is possible. I think so, but I also think Facebook is smart enough to avoid it. Regardless of this privacy issue, it's still a phenomenal product.
I don't doubt that it can happen this way. I was mostly asking to know where we are in this process; is this still just a geek phenomenon, or are "regular people" (whatever that means) starting to get on board too?
Even if they aren't right now, how many non-geeks get their information on stuff like this to a certain degree from that token geek friend (aka their "tech support" or the like)? After all if you hear from someone you trust that you feel is "more in the know" about something than you feel you could ever hope to be, and their opinion can shape it.
I think the question that needs asking is if the geeks would drive the exodus of non-geeks.
Geeks may have driven the adoption by introducing their friends to FB, would they have the same capabilities of driving their friends away from FB?
I don't think so. They would need to give their friends an alternative which is better.
This is where Diaspora comes in. Getting geeks to set-up the hubs for them and invite all their friends. The non-geeks don't have to worry about the privacy, and server related stuff, but geeks who like that stuff actually get into it.
Can geeks drive a product exodus? Yes, but making people give up a bad habit is a lot more difficult than convincing them to adopt the next cool tech. Case in point: Windows.
More specifically, I would point to college-age geeks who influence their peers, who in turn exert the influence of seniority on their younger siblings, and of youth on their superiors as they enter the workforce.
i'm not a Geek by HN standards and I care. Then again, i never opened an account in the first place because i didn't want someone else having all that info about me. The reactions among my friends and coworkers are varied, but generally i'm surprised by how much most people don't care. It's funny because many of them, as far as i know them, do actually "care" about this type of stuff. If (gasp) The Government was doing this, they'd be sharpening pitchforks.
A lot of people haven't thought about it enough to be bothered, or it doesn't seem like the kind of transgression people have learned to abhor. the consequences might be too new to be appreciated.
The thing is, the lack of outrage from nongeeks is not because they don't care, but because they don't know.
I explained Instant Personalization to my dad today and he about shit himself, right before telling me he more or less didn't believe me because Facebook didn't notify him and because he didn't opt into it.
Which is why I'm sitting down with my parents and my brother tonight for a Facebook Privacy tutorial
I've heard complaints about FB privacy from a lot of non-geeks - more general and somewhat paranoid rather than predicated on specific changes, but all from facebook users who feel confused about where the line between public and private is (as opposed to non-users who post on the internet about how the internet is bad).
I think the big picture view of this is fairly different from Scoble's take:
Facebook was able to avoid the scaling problems that plagued Friendster and still plague Twitter by gracefully dropping information. Your news feed may be behind some of the time and may occasionally be incomplete. Most people don't notice or care.
Facebook initially had a fairly detailed security model and fairly cautious default settings. This became a problem because it led to significant computational overhead serving requests.
Even an extremely well funded firm like Facebook realizes that if the 97% of photos that nobody cares are public require a db lookup, that's a lot of extra cycles. Due to the nature of the social graph, the problem was increasing exponentially every day and had to be dealt with.
So Zuckerberg decided to just cut away a lot of the added load in one fell swoop by changing the default setting on a lot of stuff. The servers and accountants breathed a sigh of relief.
The fallout has been remarkably small considering how significant a change this was and how crippling it could have been.
I imagine the like button announcement was intended to distract from the security changes, but instead it sort of added to the concerns.
It will blow over. Scaling problems aside I think the main advantage Twitter has over Facebook is that it doesn't try to include much of a security model which means everyone understands the security model. Nothing is really private on Facebook anyway.
> I think the main advantage Twitter has over Facebook is that it doesn't try to include much of a security model which means everyone understands the security model. Nothing is really private on Facebook anyway.
Yeah, I think that's true. The historical problem for Facebook is that they got a lot of their build-up precisely by promoting themselves as having a security model. Unlike MySpace, which was a big sea of public profiles, Facebook was the place where you had to have an .edu address to sign up, and your information was kept within your circle of friends (for some kinds) or university network (for other kinds), and their marketing made a big deal of that info-stays-in-your-network aspect. So people feel that Facebook hasn't been handling privacy in keeping with how they said they were going to.
Twitter, meanwhile, never promised you much of anything: either your profile is public, or it's private, and they've stuck to that, and AFAIK haven't made any significant changes to what "private" means.
I'm so tired of hearing this. It was private once. Not everything on the internet is public. My bank information is on the internet via my bank's website and that's not public. There's a space for private social networks where I can just communicate with my sisters and wife and dad and not have to worry about what we are sharing with each other being publicly broadcasted.
Well, your sisters or wife or dad could repost something you posted and then it's only as secure as their settings.
Also, if you are both tagged in a picture then all of your friends' friends can see the picture of you if your friend lets them.
And, if someone finds an old embarrassing picture of you they can just upload it to Facebook and tag you and all of their friends (yours if you share mutual friends) are notified and can look at it until you get a chance to un-tag yourself.
Can't wait for the day when even messages get exposed bit by bit to APIs and third parties. It will get slipped in as a default one day, and before you know it...
That is a good breakdown of Scoble's open letter, it was more of a love letter than a dear john letter. As mentioned, the gist of the letter is that, according to Scoble, the PR issue will blow over if Mark Zuckerberg invites Scoble over to his house.
Implementing these suggestions would limit the use of the information and thus limit the spread. Zuckerberg doesn't want people to make the choice on whether to share their data because he knows that most will decline, which limits the amount of data that can be shared with the world (and advertisers/3rd party apps).
It's much easier to make it the default and let a few people complain. The problem is, there's a limit that will eventually be reached where a lot of people complain and here we are.
The new idea that caught my eye here: Facebook could hire a firm to audit their privacy processes. They wouldn't have to give up any flexibility in their privacy policy updating practices, the review could just be of their processes, and it would provide some reassurance.
This is also the sort of thing where if one leader did it (Google, Twitter, etc.), it could basically force the others to follow.
When hell freezes over I'll expect that to be top of the list. The last thing these companies want is some nosy third party telling the public at large what data they hold on you and what they do with it.
Page views and ad impressions, sure. But what about licensing all of the data to others? Sure that must be an attractive source of revenue, and if it's 'private' it's harder to do.
The fact is fB wants everyone to share everything: that's tons more open attention data they can mine for spam. This is why they NeVeR offer fine grained controls on sharing: its a business play.
They saw what twitter did with open friends lists and open posts and decided their privacy stuff was only holding them back, and heck why not ditch it? But just like Buzz they double crossed their users (what you thought was not shared is shared etc.).
This is the era of double crossing your users!
That Diaspora hailmary is a crock, wait for some talented ex-googlers or some such phenoms to really come up with an open social graph / plan / project. It will come ...
In a way it shows they may not even understand their branding, b/c twitter is a totally different beast than fB, fB should strive to be personal and trustworthy not jacking your shxt.
The common feeling that we can’t trust Facebook anymore."
This logic cracks me up. Maybe that feeling is common among Scoble readers, but I'd be surprised if my dad (who certainly far more closely resembles Facebook's 400 million users than anyone reading that post does) even knows anything changed.
Facebook is smart enough to ignore this because they know 99% of their users will be apathetic if they even find out.
29 comments
[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 85.4 ms ] threadHas anyone heard something about Facebook and trust/privacy/openness from a non-geek in the recent past? Is this going mainstream or are we in a bubble?
If you piss off that same crowd, sooner or later the ripple will be felt. Depending on the order of magnitude, it could very well turn into a tidal wave as it gains speed. Makes you wonder if hockey stick inversion is possible. I think so, but I also think Facebook is smart enough to avoid it. Regardless of this privacy issue, it's still a phenomenal product.
Geeks may have driven the adoption by introducing their friends to FB, would they have the same capabilities of driving their friends away from FB?
I don't think so. They would need to give their friends an alternative which is better.
This is where Diaspora comes in. Getting geeks to set-up the hubs for them and invite all their friends. The non-geeks don't have to worry about the privacy, and server related stuff, but geeks who like that stuff actually get into it.
A lot of people haven't thought about it enough to be bothered, or it doesn't seem like the kind of transgression people have learned to abhor. the consequences might be too new to be appreciated.
I explained Instant Personalization to my dad today and he about shit himself, right before telling me he more or less didn't believe me because Facebook didn't notify him and because he didn't opt into it.
Which is why I'm sitting down with my parents and my brother tonight for a Facebook Privacy tutorial
Facebook was able to avoid the scaling problems that plagued Friendster and still plague Twitter by gracefully dropping information. Your news feed may be behind some of the time and may occasionally be incomplete. Most people don't notice or care.
Facebook initially had a fairly detailed security model and fairly cautious default settings. This became a problem because it led to significant computational overhead serving requests.
Even an extremely well funded firm like Facebook realizes that if the 97% of photos that nobody cares are public require a db lookup, that's a lot of extra cycles. Due to the nature of the social graph, the problem was increasing exponentially every day and had to be dealt with.
So Zuckerberg decided to just cut away a lot of the added load in one fell swoop by changing the default setting on a lot of stuff. The servers and accountants breathed a sigh of relief.
The fallout has been remarkably small considering how significant a change this was and how crippling it could have been.
I imagine the like button announcement was intended to distract from the security changes, but instead it sort of added to the concerns.
It will blow over. Scaling problems aside I think the main advantage Twitter has over Facebook is that it doesn't try to include much of a security model which means everyone understands the security model. Nothing is really private on Facebook anyway.
Yeah, I think that's true. The historical problem for Facebook is that they got a lot of their build-up precisely by promoting themselves as having a security model. Unlike MySpace, which was a big sea of public profiles, Facebook was the place where you had to have an .edu address to sign up, and your information was kept within your circle of friends (for some kinds) or university network (for other kinds), and their marketing made a big deal of that info-stays-in-your-network aspect. So people feel that Facebook hasn't been handling privacy in keeping with how they said they were going to.
Twitter, meanwhile, never promised you much of anything: either your profile is public, or it's private, and they've stuck to that, and AFAIK haven't made any significant changes to what "private" means.
I'm so tired of hearing this. It was private once. Not everything on the internet is public. My bank information is on the internet via my bank's website and that's not public. There's a space for private social networks where I can just communicate with my sisters and wife and dad and not have to worry about what we are sharing with each other being publicly broadcasted.
Also, if you are both tagged in a picture then all of your friends' friends can see the picture of you if your friend lets them.
And, if someone finds an old embarrassing picture of you they can just upload it to Facebook and tag you and all of their friends (yours if you share mutual friends) are notified and can look at it until you get a chance to un-tag yourself.
It's much easier to make it the default and let a few people complain. The problem is, there's a limit that will eventually be reached where a lot of people complain and here we are.
This is also the sort of thing where if one leader did it (Google, Twitter, etc.), it could basically force the others to follow.
Yes, that would be nice, but Zuck can't really just come out and say "PAGE VIEWS. PAGE VIEWS AND AD IMPRESSIONS" now can he?
They saw what twitter did with open friends lists and open posts and decided their privacy stuff was only holding them back, and heck why not ditch it? But just like Buzz they double crossed their users (what you thought was not shared is shared etc.).
This is the era of double crossing your users!
That Diaspora hailmary is a crock, wait for some talented ex-googlers or some such phenoms to really come up with an open social graph / plan / project. It will come ...
The common feeling that we can’t trust Facebook anymore."
This logic cracks me up. Maybe that feeling is common among Scoble readers, but I'd be surprised if my dad (who certainly far more closely resembles Facebook's 400 million users than anyone reading that post does) even knows anything changed.
Facebook is smart enough to ignore this because they know 99% of their users will be apathetic if they even find out.