As blogged about on the Second Life blog. I'll have a more complete post soon, with all the recent changes for Second Life, and what that means to virtual world development, business, and educators.
6/24/2010
6/01/2010
Facebook Doesn't Get It, Redux
There's plenty of blogs describing why Facebook is playing a very corporate game of "pretend we hear you and deliver you something different from what you ask for, so we can keep selling ads". Time for a straight-out point-by-point rebuttal.
What should we use? Let's look at a paragon of real journalism such as The Washington Post. I"m disappointed that they would feature a column by none other than Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg himself arguing how new Facebook settings are, no seriously, safe and stuff and easy, for reals this time. But doing a basic search of TWP online, I see a slew of articles on "Facebook's new security features" and only op-ed on "Can We Trust Facebook?"
Let's go to the article.
"Six years ago, we built Facebook around a few simple ideas."
First sentence, and already it's a stretch. Why does Zuckerberg need to dance around the "I built this in my dorm room and bragged about how people were stupid f**ks for giving him their personal info"? Oh, right.
"a world that's more open and connected is a better world."
This is Facebook's "core" principle. Notice that this is the exact opposite of privacy. Zuckerberg had an easy out here, too. He could have said, "a world where people feel comfortable to share what they want to share and be open while knowing their privacy is safe is a better world"; that certainly would still be aligned with a strong social network site. But no, I read Zuckerberg's statement for what it is - a declaration against privacy as a core principle.
" The biggest message we have heard recently is that people want easier control over their information. Simply put, many of you thought our controls were too complex."
NO!!!!! People don't like that you're making it very difficult to make things private. It just so happens that the vehicle of doing this is by making your controls way too complex. Oh, and then there's the problem where you always use a "opt-out" system, where your privacy is invaded as default, until you tell Facebook that you, like most human beings, like privacy.
This is the crux of what's wrong with Zuckerberg and Facebook. Almost everyone knows that the issue with Facebook isn't the complexity, but the opt-out. So if you're "thinking really long and hard" as you claim about privacy issues, then I can only deduce that you purposely are misstating the problem. It's no surprise. Facebook makes money on ads. How do you make money on ads? Demographic information to better target your audience.
"We will also give you an easy way to turn off all third-party services. "
Oh, there's a brilliant idea. The whole genius of Facebook is the developer community. Vanilla-flavored Facebook is LinkedIn, or MySpace. The whole reason I signed up for Facebook was for the neat apps. So now you're saying, "remove all of your apps" as a security solution? You're such a jerk for claiming this is a solution. Here's what will happen: You will have people try this, realize nothing on Facebook but the basics works, and then will promptly re-enable it.
"Here are the principles under which Facebook operates:
You have control over how your information is shared."
But, apparently principle #1 is just for talking-points, and never actually implemented.
"We do not share your personal information with people or services you don't want"
By making Facebook's privacy complex, as well as making it opt-out, then essentially, this is a farse.
"We do not give advertisers access to your personal information."
And by "personal" obviously you mean "stuff you don't share". And of course, by default you share everything. See how this b.s. works, folks?
"We do not and never will sell any of your information to anyone."
Of course you don't sell the information. You simply let people take it, and take a cut of their profits, like Zynga.
"We will always keep Facebook a free service for everyone."
Well whoopdie-frickin'-do.
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