Parents of young children can spot an insincere apology from miles away.
"Sorry," your tot mumbles, after you find the dog half-shaved and your Xbox full of jam.
"Sorry for what?" you'll say. "Sorry for shaving the dog and putting jam in your Xbox," he'll say, looking at the floor. But he's lying. He's only sorry that he didn't get away with it.
Facebook's much-reported apology in the Washington Post is a bit like that. "Sorry," says Mark Zuckerberg. "Sorry for what?" the internet asks.
"Sorry for invading your privacy and making things confusing and stuff," Zuckerberg says. "Can I have an ice cream now?"
In his article, Zuckerberg explains the "principles under which Facebook operates". Number one? "You have control over how your information is shared"; number two, "We do not share your personal information with people or services you don't want". Number three, "We do not give advertisers access to your personal information."
Principles are good things, but only if you stick to them.
You have control? Facebook doesn't share with people you don't want to share with? Then why did EU regulators warn Facebook earlier this month that its most recent privacy changes, which made private information public by default, were "unacceptable"?
Why do we need a stand-alone bit of software to work out what we're sharing and with whom? As for not giving advertisers access, here's a story about, er, Facebook accidentally giving advertisers access to people's private information.
If Facebook really cared about protecting your data, it would make features opt-in, not opt-out: it would say "here's your stuff, and we won't share it unless you want us to" rather than "we're sharing all your stuff with everyone until and unless you can find the right options to stop us".
But it won't, because the fifth principle Zuckerberg describes - "We will always keep Facebook a free service for everyone" - means that the only way Facebook's going to make money is by invading its users' privacy.
Forget Zuckerberg's claim that Facebook's mission is about "giving people the power to share and making the world more open and connected." Facebook's mission is to make money.
Facebook isn't sorry. It says it's sorry, but it isn't sorry. Sure, it'll come up with tweaked privacy settings to defray criticism, just like it did in December 2009. And in August 2009. And in March 2008. And in December 2007.
But make no mistake. Mark Zuckerberg has his eye on your Xbox, and he's got jam jars in his hand.
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Liked this? Then check out 10 tips to protect your privacy on Facebook
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Your comments (5) Click to add a new comment
noteasilyduped
May 26th 2010
5. Facebook exists within a terrible dichotomy that cannot reasonably be reconciled.
1) The people who use Facebook do so with a reasonable expectation of privacy and for the most part, do not want to share the information they post online - even though they are posting it online.
2) Facebook cannot exist forever unless it monetizes its popularity. The only thing it can monetize is the information that its users contribute or a subset/amalgamation of the data its users contribute.
As we've seen in the last month, the more Facebook moves to profit from its only product (information) the more its raises the hackles of the very community it serves.
Or perhaps, more accurately, the more it raises the attention of pundits, politicians and policy makers who can make life very difficult for Facebook.
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corbow
May 26th 2010
4. As someone said elsewhere, us Facebook users are *not* the customer. We're the product.
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elliotwilcox
May 26th 2010
3. We elect public officials whom we don't trust with our privacy, why would we trust two pimply faced college boys who started Facebook with our privacy?
Here is the way facebook, myspace, twitter wind up selling advertising and making money: They hire PHD's to research and use the following software to data mine all of the information in their databases:
Lingpipe: linguistic analysis of human language (they are analyzing everything you say)
RapidMiner: text mining and text categorization tasks (they are analyzing everything you say, again)
Weka: contains tools for data pre-processing, classification, regression, clustering, association rules, and visualization. It is also well-suited for developing new machine learning schemes (the machines are learning from everything you say)
Computer Vision: automated extraction of information from images (they are learning from every image you upload)
Freebase (not the drug): connects you with 11,971,013(grows) topics across the web
Nature Language processing: A natural language parser is a program that works out the grammatical structure of sentences, for instance, which groups of words go together (as "phrases") and which words are the subject or object of a verb. Probabilistic parsers use knowledge of language gained from hand-parsed sentences to try to produce the most likely analysis of new sentences. These statistical parsers still make some mistakes, but commonly work rather well. Their development was one of the biggest breakthroughs in natural language processing in the 1990s.
If you believe their statistics, Facebook could charge each user $1 dollar per year to use their service, guarantee privacy and still make $400 million per year. Isn't that enough money for two college kids to run an online company and protect our privacy?
http://gregrank.com
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tech89
May 26th 2010
2. What can people's information actuality be used for apart from online targeted advertising?
There is no specific address, just areas or towns so there is no worry of addresses being sold to companies and being sent junk mail.
And you can't blame facebook for trying to make a buck here and there if they can. After all powering it's servers, employing staff monitoring the site, public relations and pleasing investors can't be cheap.
And if people are unhappy with the privacy settings there are at least half a dozen other facebooks out there to pick from.
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duskrider
May 25th 2010
1. Bingo!
Standard rules apply: if you don't want it put on a billboard, don't put it on the internet.
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