Welcome to the Fish Bowl
The other day, a facebook friend posted some status about joining Chuck Schumer in demanding that facebook not sell your information to advertisers or else we’ll all cry in our beer and update our status to righteous indignation or something. First of all, the thought of joining Chuck Schumer generally sickens me. Second, enjoy your free ice cream or quit using facebook. When you signed up, you agreed to play by their rules. Your continued use of it implies your continued agreement to play by their rules. And their terms of use pretty much say they can do whatever they want with their data (which is your data that you have given to them). Everything on the internet is out there. And probably forever. You have no privacy once you step into the fishbowl. Forget thinking that you do or stop using it.
Like Alan, I can’t quite muster any rage. The site needs to make money and, since there are groups called 10M strong for not paying for facebook or some-such, money has to come from somewhere.
Xrlq says facebook should address the privacy concerns or people will start jumping ship to other social networking sites. And that’s the way to get your concerns addressed.
May 25th, 2010 at 9:12 am
We can’t have the free market determine this! REGULATION! GOVT! SOMEBODY DO SOMETHING!
May 25th, 2010 at 9:35 am
I guess I’m doing it wrong. I use FB for status updates, to check in on friends from time to time, and to post pictures so that someone else pays for the bandwidth.
I don’t post my deepest secrets on there, I don’t put up intros to my next novel, and nothing that goes on there is anything I wouldn’t want the world to see anyway.
If Facebook can sell the fact that I’m telling all 300 of my friends that I’m taking a dump, more power to them.
May 25th, 2010 at 9:44 am
So when they all jump ship for another social networking site, what do they do when that social networking site starts selling their data (because they have to pay bills too!). Oh yeah, whine, complain, and jump ship.
Rinse, repeat.
May 25th, 2010 at 9:53 am
My understanding is that their terms of service used to say they would protect your information, then they changed it without telling you.
I agree that those signing up now don’t have much of a leg to stand on, but those caught by FB’s bait and switch I think, have a legitimate fraud complaint.
FB User: “You said you’d protect my info!”
FB: “I’m altering the deal. Pray I don’t alter it any further. It’d be a shame if I had to hack your email.“
May 25th, 2010 at 9:58 am
it would be interesting if someone sued, I suppose.
May 25th, 2010 at 10:20 am
Xrlq says facebook should address the privacy concerns or people will start jumping ship to other social networking sites. And that’s the way to get your concerns addressed.
Imagine that, a free market solution! Inconceivable!
May 25th, 2010 at 11:02 am
Way back in the mid 1970s, cable TV came to my semi-rural neck of the woods in NC. The sales pitch was that we would pay a small monthly fee for getting oh-so-many more channels than the 4 we got free via the rabbit ears atop the idiot box, and that since we were paying a user fee, there would be few if any commercials. Sounded great.
Immediately following signup for the cable service, everyone learned that there were still plenty of commercials on cable channels. And watchers saw more ads than on regular TV, since there were more channels to watch.
Same story, different medium.
May 25th, 2010 at 11:05 am
“My understanding is that their terms of service used to say they would protect your information, then they changed it without telling you.”
Exactly. Facebook frequently changes it’s policies without warning and often without even notification. The user agreement you signed up with bears no resemblence to the one they may be operating under the next day. They also routinely reset your privacy settings whenever the rework that section of the site. None of these are a good thing.
May 25th, 2010 at 11:19 am
Jeff, I’d only agree that’s a problem for the 3 or 4 people who bothered actually reading the privacy statement.
Everyone else who’s complaining about it changing on them are lying that they knew what it was to begin with.
May 25th, 2010 at 12:41 pm
Everyone else who’s complaining about it changing on them are lying that they knew what it was to begin with.
Probably true.
It also doesn’t seem particularly relevant. If you made a contract that you had no intention of honoring, the other person’s laziness doesn’t make your fraud OK.
May 25th, 2010 at 1:49 pm
I’m not defending the fraud, mind you. It’s just funny that many of these people who are complaining had no idea what was in the original rules to begin with.
I don’t care what FB does with what I post on there since it’s public anyway. I can understand people’s frustration if they believed
in leprechaunsthat a free service was going to keep everything they typed hush hush and then it turned out they weren’t. Lawsuits are called for in this case, but I believe that only people who were aware of the original contract should have standing.May 25th, 2010 at 4:50 pm
Oh, I’m all for laughing at stupid people. 🙂
That the other person can only perpetuate his fraud because of your stupidity doesn’t absolve you of your stupidity either.
That said, not everything you type into facebook is “public”. Say, your username and password. If FB were to sell that password so some other business could hack your email I don’t know that you couldn’t fairly argue that that information did have an expectation of privacy. At the same time, if they give you a radio button that says “Keep this info private” and then FB changed it (without your consent or knowledge) I don’t think whether you read the ToS really make much of a difference. Even if the ToS defined “Private” as “We won’t tell Satan but everyone else is fair game” I doubt that defense would (or should) stand up in court.
That said, I bet 95% of those upset right now don’t even know why they should be upset, only that other people told them they ought to be and so they are.
May 25th, 2010 at 7:35 pm
The free market still works, and FB is about to get hammered. The new anti facebook puts privacy first and a group of college kids are putting it together. Encrypted messaging, private posts, with a gurantee that your data will remain “your data”.
http://www.the33tv.com/news/pelpinaspicks/kdaf-diaspora-anti-facebook-pro-privacy-network,0,2996679.story
May 26th, 2010 at 12:13 am
Robb: “I don’t care what FB does with what I post on there since it’s public anyway. “
Correct. That and I can’t imagine any actual value being attached to the posts themselves. That’s not where the gold lies. It’s in the networking.
Small example: Say I’m friends with Robb and Unc on Facebook and they’re both fans of “Dan Wesson” and “10mm Auto”, and I’m just a fan of “10mm Auto”. My contact info would be useful to Dan Wesson because I’m probably somewhat interested in their 1911 10mm pistols. Or maybe I’m also a fan of “Colt” where Robb and Unc aren’t. Now Colt would want to know about them to market their stuff for them.
Stupid example, but I hope everybody gets the point.
When you blow it out to the actual scale that Facebook is able to track our likes, locations, and networks, the amount of targeted marketing data available is insane. I’d expect them to capitalize on that.
Nobody cares that you posted that you went poopy on the potty. Or that you kissed X while drunk at a party. That’s not valuable to anybody. Well, maybe a divorce attorney.
So, go ahead and sell my data. If that means I stop getting “punch the monkey for a lower mortgage rate” ads and get Dan Wesson ads instead I’m all for it.