The Erosion of Privacy on Facebook: Read the News and Audit Your Account

Could Facebook have grown its community to hundreds of millions of users so quickly if it had not promised to protect the privacy of its users? I suspect the answer is "no." Users trusted Facebook, and they signed up in droves.

Evidently, the company feels it has grown big enough that it can rescind its earlier promises about data privacy and weather whatever micro-storm of protest ensues. As has been much reported, the company is changing its privacy policies and—just as importantly—its UI for controlling privacy settings.

The policies now lean toward disclosure rather than containment. The new UI controls require one to click, click, click with the perseverance of a busy switchboard operator to regain most of the privacy one enjoyed a few months ago. Alas, it's impossible to regain all of it.

Facebook wants to ensure that it and its partners have access to as much personal information as possible. That's how they'll make money.

Their loosey-goosey manner of opening the floodgates leaves users vulnerable to all sorts of hacks, exposing private data not just to Facebook and its partners, but also to any hacker or marketer with sufficient diligence and cunning. (See Wired Magazine's article, Rogue Marketers Can Mine Your Info on Facebook.)

Users, understandably, are unhappy. Fifteen organizations have banded together to file a complaint to the FTC. User defections are becoming more common and well publicized. Facebook management is scrambling to the respond.

For a quick summary of what's changed, what's new, and how exposed your own Facebook account is, consult the following.

Analysis

Electronic Frontier Foundation

Facebook's Eroding Privacy Policy: A Timeline

Updated: Facebook Further Reduces Your Control Over Personal Information

Quote from this second article:

Today, Facebook removed its users' ability to control who can see their own interests and personal information. Certain parts of users' profiles, "including your current city, hometown, education and work, and likes and interests" will now be transformed into "connections," meaning that they will be shared publicly. If you don't want these parts of your profile to be made public, your only option is to delete them. . . .

But even for an innocuous interest like cooking, it’s not clear how this change is meant to benefit Facebook's users. An ordinary human is not going to look through the list of Facebook's millions of cooking fans. It's far too large. Only data miners and targeted advertisers have the time and inclination to delve that deeply.

New York Times

Facebook Privacy: A Bewildering Tangle of Options (a chart showing the hierarchy of Facebook's new privacy settings)

Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada

Report of Findings into the Complaint Filed by the Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic (CIPPIC) against Facebook Inc. Under the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (2009)

Wired Magazine

Public Posting Now the Default on Facebook (December 2009)

Quote:

Facebook estimates that 80 to 85 percent of its users have stuck with the default privacy settings, which means hundreds of millions of users will soon be publishing to the entire net, by default when they type into their status box. The previous defaults for status updates were “Friends of Friends” and networks, including geographic ones with millions of users, while photos defaulted to everyone.

Audit Tools

Profile Watch: Scans your privacy settings and rates your exposure on a scale of 1 to 10.

ReclaimPrivacy.org: Scans your Facebook privacy settings and provides detailed analysis of your exposure, along with links to the Privacy Settings page on which you can make adjustments for a particular score.

If you know of other useful audit tools, please let me know.

Thanks to Sarah Evans for the link to Profile Watch and to Chris Marino for the link to Reclaim Privacy.

Photo credits:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/calliope/ / CC BY 2.0

Socialcast Helps Teams at NASA Communicate More Easily and Capture Tacit Knowledge

NASA, where the hard work literally is rocket science, depends on timely communication: not just between control centers and distant space craft, but also among workers distributed across NASA's ten major R&D centers. Recently the issue of inter-center communication has become especially important, as NASA undertakes its Constellation program to update the Space Shuttle. Previous NASA missions were usually developed at a single NASA center. The Constellation project, a major technical undertaking, spans centers and requires far-flung research and engineering teams to work together efficiently.

So it behooves NASA to find broadly applicable solutions for employees and contractors to exchange information—exchange it, and record it, too, for another transformation NASA is facing is the aging and retiring of its workforce. The average NASA employee is nearly 47 years old and has worked at the organization for 17 years. There's a lot of NASA history and knowledge walking around in lab coats and business casual. And many of those employees are beginning to retire. To preserve the organization's intellectual capital, NASA needs to find a convenient, unobtrusive way for employees to record and share their tacit knowledge.

These challenges were evident to a group of NASA JPL engineers who attended the KM World conference back in 2007. There they heard a talk by Tim Young, CEO of a social networking platform solution called Socialcast. Tim talked about the benefits of Socialcast, a SaaS service that enables company employees to post status messages, ask and answer questions, share documents, and so on.

The NASA engineers were intrigued and decided to launch a pilot project. Celeste Merryman, a pilot manager for Computer Sciences Corporation (CSC) at NASA JPL, and Douglas Hughes, a project manager at NASA JPL, ran the pilot project, which involved customizing Socialcast for the NASA environment. The new SaaS service was dubbed NASAsphere.

Now the results of that NASAsphere pilot are in, and they're quite compelling.

• NASAsphere participants invited 398 of their colleagues from around NASA, with 55% acceptance rate.
  
• Within the 60-day span of the pilot, the NASAsphere community grew from 78 activated accounts to 295.
  
• Communications truly crossed geographic centers. When employees posed questions, 93% of the answers came from users at remote locations. By the end of the pilot, at least one person from every NASA center had participated in the NASAsphere community.
  
• A survey of NASAsphere users found that 52% recommended the platform be implemented for contractors and civilians, in addition to employees.
  
• In the same survey, 45% of users said they expected they would contribute to the NASAsphere platform weekly.
  
• Not surprisingly, the report recommends a broader implementation of the Socialcast solution.
  

For more details about the pilot and its results, check out the NASAsphere SlideShare presentation here or the final NASA JPL report here.

Organizing without Organizations (or Hush! Caution! Echoland! Here Comes Everybody)

Consider the following:

• In 1992, the Boston Globe runs news stories about a Catholic priest who abused children for decades before being pulled from rotation among parishes. Boston parishioners are upset, but their anger lacks any organizational punch. The most they can do is mutter into their missals and write a letter or two. The Church leaders treat the scandal as an internal affair, and the incident dies down. In 2002, the Globe runs similar news stories about yet another priest, John Geoghan, who abused children for several decades. This time the parishioners create an organization, Voice of the Faithful, whose ranks swell to 25,000 people within a few months. Voice of the Faithful's clout is such that after decades of successfully squelching criticism and revolt, the local Catholic bishop is forced to resign.
  
• In the 2004 presidential election, Howard Dean’s supporters organize online, produce surprisingly large crowds of supporters at events, and raise more funds than the rival campaigns. Despite this show of strength, Dean does poorly in the primaries and the nomination goes to John Kerry.
  
• In 1992, a young Finnish programmer posts a message on a message board, announcing that he’s going to free operating system as a hobby. Fifteen years later, the free operating system, Linux, is running on nearly 40% of the world’s servers.
  
• One morning in Cairo, an Egyptian blogger is arrested for libel. Using Twitter, a micro-blogging service (micro-blogging is blogging with very short blog posts), he informs his friends, who rally lawyers, and by 11 pm that night he is free.
  

What all these stories have in common is that social tools such as email enabled people to communicate and collaborate in ways that would have been unimaginable a decade or two ago. Email, wikis, blogs, and social network sites such as Facebook and MySpace make it easy for people to connect to one another and share information. The cost of communicating is negligible. The speed of communication is almost instant. The ramifications are many.

As Clay Shirky, an IT consultant and teacher at NYU's Interactive Telecommunications Program, writes in his new book, Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing without Organizations, social tools like email have changed social behavior forever. Not all online social endeavors will succeed—the Dean campaign failed because it had a committed core but lacked a broad, committed base—but many will succeed, a few wildly so. As the Boston diocese discovered, when large numbers of people suddenly have the ability to organize easily, they become a powerful, just about unstoppable force for change. New broad-based movements can start at any time. And no traditional organization or government can contain them.

We're all aware of at least some of the impact of these tools: all the teenagers on Facebook, solicitations from PACs for emailing Congress, and so on. But few of us have surveyed the broad effects of these tools in a systematic way to gain an understanding of how people, social contracts, and software are all interacting. Shirky gives us this survey, and it's lucid and thought-provoking.

He points out:

"We now have communications tools that are flexible enough to match our social capabilities, and we are witnessing the rise of new ways of coordinating action that take advantage of that change. . . . These tools have radically altered the old limits on the size, sophistication, and scope of unsupervised effort."

Email, blogs, and wikis dramatically lower the cost of coordinating group efforts. They enable groups to organize quickly and easily and to take on daunting projects that traditional organizations, with their hierarchical structures and cost-consciousness, would never consider. When organization becomes easy, more people will organize. When more people can organize, new forces for change will sweep society, affecting government, business, culture, and personal lives.

In just under 300 pages, Shirky explores the characteristics, implications, and results of the new types of social interactions and organizations that have emerged in the past decade. Here’s a quick survey of some of his insights:

• The power law distribution (think of the curve you’ve seen in discussion of the long tail phenomenon) describes all sorts of social behavior, from contributors to Wikipedia to the popularity of blogs to programming work done on open source software projects.
  
• Participation in most social systems follows a power law distribution. A few contributors do most of the work. Most contributors do almost nothing. The work of the industrious few provides so much value to the less industrious majority, though, that they feel motivated to contribute, improving the breadth and quality of the entire project.
  
• If the majority of blog entries, MySpace pages, and other online content strikes you as trivial and inane; don’t worry. It doesn’t really matter, because you’re not the intended audience. These communications are public, but their intended for a select audience of friends and family. Shirk likens blog posts such as “What’s happening, dude?” to a conversation overheard in a shopping mall. Comparing the artistic quality of a blog post or MySpace page to a story in the New Yorker misses the point. And you will be overlooking the manifest transformative power of these new tools, were you simply to dismiss them because of their low editorial standards.
  
• As communication moves online, it becomes permanent through digital archives. Until now, most of what was preserved was official. Now everyday remarks are by default permanently "on the record."
  
• Social tools like the Web site Meetup.com enable small, splintered groups to meet and form. People who have explicitly left organizations (such as churches) can now easily organize themselves.
  
• Group projects follow this pattern: offer, tool, bargain. Someone initiates the group by making an offer, the group uses a tool to undertake group activity, and the behavior and expectations of the group are governed by an explicit bargain. Selecting the wrong offer, tool, or bargain can doom a project. That said, the particulars of group projects are so varied and complex, it would be folly to proscribe specific offers, tools, or bargains categorically.
  
• The best ideas in an organization usually come from people who bridge social groups within the organization. They’re able to assess a situation with a fresh perspective, and they feel less compulsion for conforming with peers and for preserving the status quo of a department.
  
• "No whining!" is a rule common to many social groups (and if that upsets you, please keep it to yourself).
  

Shirky does an excellent job analyzing the results—intended and otherwise—of new forms of social organization, such as meetups and groups like Voices of the Faithful. Whether you’re interested in applying some of these group dynamics to your business, or you simply want to read an engaging account of how these tools are changing the world you live in, you’ll find this book well worth your time.

POSTSCRIPT

As a Joycean, I feel compelled to mention that the phrase "Here Comes Everybody" is a kind of motif from Finnigans Wake, where the phrase serves as the basis for all sorts of other phrases with the initials HCE. For a list of HCE phrases, which you can imagine applying to social networks in all sorts of ways, click here. As you might guess, the title of this blog post, "Hush! Caution! Echoland!" is an HCE phrase from FW.