Commentary
Facebook's Self-Defeating Slip Ups
- by Erik Sass , Staff Writer @eriksass1, May 7, 2010
I generally
stand on the side of commerce, and there's no question Facebook needs to justify its massive valuation by monetizing its massive audience. I also know it's much easier to be an armchair CEO, kibitzing
and criticizing from the sidelines, than to actually lead a big company in a dynamic market environment, under pressure from investors and the press and the public and politicians. Still: this was not
the right way for Facebook to introduce a new business strategy.
Zuckerberg and co. must have known that the new Open Graph program -- which shares information about members with other Web sites -- was going to stir some controversy. Their previous privacy debacle with Beacon should be seared into their collective corporate memory, and they also had more recent instructive examples, like Google's Buzz backlash, to remind them that privacy issues are not to be trifled with. Rightly or wrongly, new features that are totally above-board -- meaning, 100% legal and covered by existing user agreements -- can still trigger alarm. Extreme caution is warranted, lest they kill their $30 billion goose before it lays a single golden egg.
In that context, you'd think they would make a special effort to resolve existing privacy issues before launching the new feature. From a public relations perspective, any privacy screw-ups will seriously handicap their attempt persuade users and regulation-happy politicians to accept the controversial new program. From a purely technical or operational perspective, they are committing themselves to a two-front war, fighting a rear-guard action against existing problems while venturing into a new minefield of potential glitches (as a guy I'm apparently compelled to turn this into WWII).
So it doesn't exactly instill confidence when users report a raft of problems with the existing Facebook service. In just the last few days, Facebook has stumbled in a couple areas. The most serious transgression: on Wednesday TechCrunch reported that users who clicked on the "Preview my profile" option were able to view their friends' live chats and unanswered, pending friend requests.
This is a big, big screw-up: it doesn't get much more private than an individual's live chats. I don't even know what kind of stuff was made public, but there is obviously a high potential for embarrassing, personally damaging repercussions -- the kind that lead to lawsuits. Facebook responded by temporarily shutting down chat while its engineers went in to fix the problem -- but as many bloggers pointed out, nobody really knows how long this chink in the armor was open, and it raises the question how many more undiagnosed glitches there are sprinkled throughout the system.
Meanwhile there are reports on other blogs that Facebook's system doesn't always respond to requests to make profiles, or parts of profiles, private -- something that will surely come up more often as users react to the Open Graph changes. I don't want to take the conspiracy theory line, but is it a coincidence that the site appears to be ignoring privacy requests when it is just about to implement a new monetization strategy which relies on sharing user information? This would be the height of folly, of course, but it's curious: why can't a site that instantly processes chats and personal updates perform what is surely the single most important interactive function?
Erik Sass is editor of Publishers Daily. You can reach Erik at eriksass@gmail.com.
Facebook shows little to no genuine concern for their users' privacy and I don't think that will change unless someone bigger than them (government?) slaps them down.
Zuckerberg and Co have taken the "Ask for forgiveness rather than permission" mantra about as far as they can.
Does this mean anything will change? Not likely. There will be plan B,C,D and more until Facebook can get the right data from their users so advertisers can have a field day with targeting.
Who gets the shaft? The users and they will go right on their merry way because most outside our industry don't know enough or don't care enough to make it change.
Facebook's leadership is starting to treat their users as AOL did - as an asset to be sold without concern. We all know where AOL is today.
A good friend of mine just left facebook. At first I thought it was a bad idea on his part. But now, I am seriously reconsidering how and how often I use it, which will likely eventually lead to me having a meaningless presence there, or getting off the site altogether. Me thinks I'm not the only one.
I don't get what all the fuss is about. The first lesson I teach my children is that anything they post on facebook can and will come back to bite them. Are there really people out there, who still don't know that?
Here I am, Targeted Advertising, come and find me!
It's not that Facebook wants to make my profile public that worries me. My address has been available on the Internet for several years. I've used Internet searches myself to find e-mail addresses for people I wanted to contact. Most of what is available on Facebook about me is available elsewhere. What bothers me is that Facebook does not spell things out in advance so you know what's coming; it never uses "opt-in" and now "opt-out" isn't always available; and there is no way to effectively contact Facebook itself. And, it is very disconcerting when you find the tools you need to operate your site in new and different places without warning -- or gone altogether. None of which is exactly good public relations.
Facebook has a notorious reliance on outsourced developers. Chances are, specifications by half baked executives are not correctly translated into fully backed programming requirements when they get to their coders, US, Mumbia, Phillipines, China, wherever. Don't blame the people in the trenches cutting and testing code. Blame the CEO and people he hired for doing a crappy job. Wonder if they came from Lehmann Brothers after their demise? Hmm.
Facebook's attitude can be effectively summed up in a Freudian slip that Zuckerberg made in his recent, high-profile customers: "... use your friends ..."
Facebook wants to be able to monetize every single thing you ever use Facebook for. That's why they never delete your "likes" and meta-data (they really don't, it's always there and they keep using it for targeting). That's why they want to prosecute Facebook aggregators (operating and the direction and with the consent of Facebook users) for criminal trespassing.
It behooves us to remember that this is a company run by a guy who chose to freeze out his partners rather than deal with them, claiming as his own work that was performed by others. He's L. Bob Rife, made flesh.
... also, I don't have a lot of sympathy for the 'blame the victim' approach that says we're all to blame for letting FB mis-use our data. Whether we admit it or not, we all function on a trust-basis; people who claim not to are usually either predators or in denial.
If David Kirkpatrick's excerpt from his new book (posted by MediaPost the same day as this story), then Facebook is a hopeless cause -- its leader is a jerk and misogynist. Character flaws eventually catch up with people, even rich guys.
Privacy matters, still and will always.