Earlier today, Mark Zuckerberg announced that Facebook would be significantly revising the new Facebook terms of service. He writes:
Going forward, we’ve decided to take a new approach towards developing our terms. We concluded that returning to our previous terms was the right thing for now. As I said yesterday, we think that a lot of the language in our terms is overly formal and protective so we don’t plan to leave it there for long.
Our next version will be a substantial revision from where we are now. It will reflect the principles I described yesterday around how people share and control their information, and it will be written clearly in language everyone can understand. Since this will be the governing document that we’ll all live by, Facebook users will have a lot of input in crafting these terms.
Of the changes, Michael Zimmer writes:
Consider their declaration that “We won’t use the information you share on Facebook for anything you haven’t asked us to.” Ok, well, I never asked to be opted into an automatic News Feed, nor did I ask to be a part of Beacon, but Facebook used my data for these purposes without my informed consent. Will they do it again? Will a more robust behavioral targeting system be implemented? Will I have asked Facebook to use my proifle data for that purpose?
Zimmer’s comments reveal the fundamental conceit of this discussion – what is “our information” in Facebook and where does it begin and end? Put another way, it is easy to imagine a photograph we upload as “our information.” But what about the pokes we send into the ether, or even more abstractly, the deltas between our logins as recorded by Facebook’s servers. All of this is “our information,” and all of this information would be coveted by marketers.
I would like to argue that the idea of owning one’s information in the context of third-party systems is impossible. “Our information” is used, reused, extracted, archived, analyzed, recombined, logged and backed up in so many ways by third-parties, the idea of actually owning it (meaning we could “remove” it at our discretion) is an impossibility. More practically, if we did own our information, we would be able to do just as Zimmer states – opt out of Newsfeeds, control how our information flows through Facebook. I don’t forsee this happening any time soon.
To Facebook’s credit, I believe the terms update actually reflected this reality of information ownership dilemma. There are so many derivatives of information, the company couldn’t reasonably promise ownership. Information almost inherently shape-shifts in technical systems; this information-derivation “problem” affects everyone from Google and Yahoo to the lowliest blog.
How can Facebook address this issue? First, Facebook needs to move the discussion away from this overarching concept of “information.” Facebook cannot truthfully promise ownership of all of our information, at least to the extent is passes a “removal” test. Second, Facebook needs to study user perceptions of information in the site. For example, HCI literature shows us a number of gaps between “observable” information and systems- or backend-information.
A user may consider her pictures as information, but they may not consider their attention data as information. By understanding the user’s conception of information, it can more accurately craft a terms of service that reflects user’s needs. Facebook is ultimately responsible to its users. While policy wonks may deride a system that does not promise “absolute” control, Facebook should focus primarily on user conceptions of information and start building the policy out from there.
Facebook should also adopt the following practical suggestions. First, Facebook should place a reasonable lifespan (eighteen to twenty-four months) on information users identify as important. Facebook should delete my pictures within two years from the time I remove my account. Simple as that. Second, Facebook should work with a few policy and ethics organization to create a Facebook code of information ethics. A few members of this organization would comprise an external board that could review and approve that new features are in-line with the code of ethics. Finally, Facebook should hire an ombudsman. The ombudsman should be hired for a contractually-tenured period and be given a blog on a third-party server.
Mark Zuckerberg talks about Facebook as if it was a country. If Facebook were a country, it would more accurately resemble North Korea or China than the United States. Facebook must move forward aggressively to institute better corporate and ethical governance. Facebook is in a very critical phase, where a new audience is flooding in. Investments made into protecting user rights will be recouped many times over. However, if Facebook does not act aggressively, or it simply pays lip service to the problem (e.g., just creating a Facebook group), they stand to alienate this increasingly older, more rights-aware audience.
Tags: evil, facebook, information, privacy
Fred Stutzman is a doctoral student, researcher and teaching fellow at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill's School of Information and Library Science. He studies how people use social media.
One thing I’ve been thinking about recently is the potential for “Facebook as adversary” – that is, the ability of FB to deliberately work against the interests of ex-users by more aggressively selling/sharing their information. Likely? I dunno. But even with this change in policy there’s no reason it couldn’t happen.
I think all of your suggestions are good ones but the central fact is that Facebook has a massive disincentive to move at all towards user control of personal information. Their own post-S-Curve future revenue model is still… speculative, let’s say, and the idea that they would voluntarily surrender their most valuable – indeed, their only – asset without really having to do so seems improbable.
One way of looking at it is that FB is in the situation that American carmakers were in in the 1990s: making big profits/buzz on a short-term strategy (selling SUVs/riding the S-curve) but with a business that (for differing reasons, to be sure) was fundamentally unsound in the long-term. There’s a choice to be made: keep doing what you’re doing and risk total irrelevance a few years down the road, or make the tough decision and realize that while you might be fooling some people now, you know that you’re not as valuable as people think you are in the long term.
For FB, making that decision would involve working on an open identity protocol, where users can host their own data and give contingent (and revocable) permissions for others (friends, app providers like FB) to access it and draw their networks (or whatever else), and then setting themselves up as a compelling service provider in an open marketplace. They won’t do that, of course, because it means admitting that they’re not worth however many billion dollars everyone thinks they are. But not doing that or something similar does hasten the day when forces outside of FB’s control will render that judgment, anyhow.
::bow::
Stutzman San, you truely are the Facebok Zen master.
JKD:
> They won’t do that, of course,
Well, AOL presumably makes more money from an mail system that is compatible with every other one then their earlier closed format: less per user, indeed, but far more users. Many more technologies would never have taken off without open standards; Facebook knows that. They also knows that Family/Work/Party don’t alway work so well and might wish to discharge one of two of those facets to LinkedIn-likes. . . So, no, I don’t think it is *obvious* that it is in Facebook’s well-understood interest to control it all.
Closing features is distinct issue — but similarly not an obvious strategy. Actually, if one is a known dominant player, but doesn’t control a majority of the market (like it is the case for Facebook & other SNS) it is in his interest to open standards. This makes it more easy for the majority of users to move around, and most would follow the zeitgest, or simply abide by their friends who are well implanted in a monochrome environnement i.e. more would *come to the leader*.
And, for lack of any better reason: Facebook’s closeness is driving significant reputation issues, and the only significant asset of the company is the widespread saliance, the social concensus of presence there. If Facebook abuses users’ patience, many entrepreneurs could copy their technology, rent servers and see users switch to a new equilibrium, like what happened to Friendster.
I sincerly think playing nice is the dominant strategy for Facebook — but educating the crowd on the difficulty raised by co-creation of context, and it’s lack of separability. . . that’s a far more daunting task, and I’m glad Fred is here to fight that battle against ignorance.
“So, no, I don’t think it is *obvious* that it is in Facebook’s well-understood interest to control it all.”
I should’ve contextualized this a little better – I actually agree with you but what’s important here is what *Facebook* believes. And absolutely nothing in the history of the actions of the company and its management give me any reason to believe that they are able/willing to own up to the actual situation of their company. We shall see – love to be proven wrong, here.
Well, I certainly agrees that it’s their point of view that matters: I’m an economist after all (and I did write “well-understood interest”). However, for one they did their homework, Zuckerberg is a close friend of Zittrain and I’ve been pestering enough people on-line about this that I hope it has sinked in. Secondly and most importantly, the last two weeks showed a spectacular shift in that direction, mostly from Dave Morin, but he doesn’t sound isolated.