At last week’s WWW2010/FutureWeb conference, there was some interesting discussion about online privacy issues. Unsurprisingly, Facebook was the subject of particular criticism for its increasingly cavalier attitude toward privacy and manifest disrespect for users’ interest in controlling how others may access and use the content they post.
Dan Yoder sums up most of the concerns in this post, explaining why he’s decided to leave Facebook and urging others to do likewise. I find his points to be well-reasoned and highly persuasive. Still, like Charli Carpenter, I remain personally reluctant to abandon Facebook, because, as Carpenter observes, “Facebook has become not just an extension of our offline networks, but to some extent, a space in which our virtual identities live – our most important semi-imagined community.”
This is, to a great extent, a collective action problem. At least for anyone who values the social interaction that takes place on Facebook, the cost of leaving on your own is likely to be very high (I made a similar point at FutureWeb, in relation to unreasonably one–sided terms of service on virtual worlds or social web services). To reduce that cost, it would be necessary to persuade at least a substantial portion of your Facebook friends to leave with you, and for all of you to move to the same alternative place. But the cost (in time and effort) of coordinating such a group exodus would itself be sufficiently high as to deter many from trying.
In any event, I thought that Yoder’s post was sufficiently interesting that I wanted to share it with my Facebook network, in the hopes of prompting some discussion. So, I posted a link, without adding any comment of my own. I wondered whether the powers that be at Facebook would notice and object to the post. I didn’t have to wait very long to find out. Withing about 20 minutes, the Facebook gremlins had deleted the post. I received no notification nor explanation. The post simply disappeared, like the face of Trotsky from a Stalin-era portrait of the Russian Revolution.
As Yoder himself notes, Facebook is not a “public trust”. It is a private company offering a commercial service. “They owe us nothing. They can do whatever they want, within the bounds of the laws.” That includes censoring user posts that the company dislikes for whatever reason. But the fact that they are so unwilling to tolerate criticism merely serves to persuade me further that Yoder is right.
Filed under: Where the Wild Things Are | Tagged: commerce, corporations, privacy, social web | Leave a Comment »




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