Returning the Screw

There was an interesting story in Wired the other day about Facebook and its privacy settings, which were described as “maddeningly complex”, among other things, and professed a need for a open source alternative. While I don’t disagree, I think the arguments for one go beyond the issues that writer Ryan Singel pointed out, which were based primarily around privacy and basic control of personal data.

There were some things I didn’t know, such as:

Say you you write a public update, saying, “My boss had a crazy great idea for a new product!” Now, you might not know it, but there is a Facebook page for “My Crazy Boss” and because your post had all the right words, your post now shows up on that page. Include the words “FBI” or “CIA,” and you show up on the FBI or CIA page.

That’s just wrong.

But Singel goes on to say that he’d like to do things like support an cause without the whole world knowing, or have a profile that friends can see but not his boss.

This, I think is the real issue and goes beyond mere privacy and more to the point of ownership of a person’s social graph. And that goes to who owns a person’s data on Facebook. Facebook seems to believe that they do, according to some of the changes they are making. I’d like to see that issue straightened out once and for all because that would, in an ideal world where the individual owns their graph data, allow for a platform that allows for a granularity of privacy set by individuals themselves, and work toward towards the goal of eventual convergence (or at least some kind of standardization) of the major social media platforms.

For example, I would like one place where I can create lists of people in my network and seperate them into lists like work and personal. Right now, there is a wall between them because I use Facebook mostly for personal and LinkedIn almost primarily for business networking. But there is a little bit of cross over and it would be nice to be able to reach between those two worlds without having to use two separate tools.

But at the same time, I can understand some of Facebook’s moves. They are, after all, in business to make money, and I don’t have a problem with them taking my personal information such as location, date of birth, or even interests, to sending targeted ads when I log in. It’s just the abuse of that power that I have issues with.

Having said all this, I think this is an exciting time. Many of the complaints from Wired and so forth I think are more a result of the technology still being fairly immature. Like any growing industry, mistakes will be made, growth will happen, and who knows, in five years or so all these arguments will be behind us and we’ll be bitching about something else, but enjoying a stable environment in which we conduct our social activities online.