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 …
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.