Facebook and “radical transparency”

http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/2010/05/14/facebook-and-radical-transparency-a-rant.html

by v0xel • 16 years ago

56 32 16 years ago

raganwald3• 16 years ago

+ a bushelful for pointing out that Facebook's UI is deliberately disingenuous: It encourages people to share information while carefully obscuring how widely that information is being shared.

Do people who share their status with "everyone" really understand that their entire history of updates are being scraped and aggregated by "partners," or do they think that it's only being read by people who happen to search for them personally?

As the author puts it, it's a case of a lack of informed consent. And that is unethical.

natrius6• 16 years ago

How could they possibly explain all of the implications of "everyone" that people might be worried about? It says everyone. If there's something you don't want every single person on the face of the planet to be able to read, don't set things to "everyone".

I don't think the problem is people underestimating friends of friends. It's not knowing when they're sharing with everyone. Instead of having to click a button below the status box to see who you're going to be sharing with, the current setting should be displayed on the button itself so it's always visible.

raganwald3• 16 years ago

I think the expression "informed consent" is the crux. If a doctor is discussing a procedure with you and they say, "there are certain risks," it is not enough that they tell you, they must make sure you actually understand the implications well enough to make a reasonable decision.

Informed consent is a much higher standard than simple "consent."

The argument here is that while Facebook may technically be telling you everything you need to know, they aren't actually achieving informed consent. If you mistakenly think "everyone" means everyone who uses Facebook personally, you haven't given them informed consent to share your information with a credit bureau.

webwright2• 16 years ago

I'm not sure it's deliberately disingenuous (though it's certainly disingenuous). I think this is a side effect of putting a bunch of REALLY smart hackers in charge of the UX at Facebook. It's lost it's simplicity in favor of power. People keep asking for power/control, and Facebook adds it. Rinse/repeat and we have more knobs and levers than most users can really grok without a pretty big investment in time.

kareemm5• 16 years ago

> People keep asking for power/control

Who does? Most users I know of any system (hackers included) prefer simplicity.

derefr• 16 years ago

> When people think “friends-of-friends” they don’t think about all of the types of people that their friends might link to; they think of the people that their friends would bring to a dinner party if they were to host it.

Could the second category be realized as an algorithm/interface-aspect? Because, basically, this is what Facebook comes down to: "I want to share things with people I have determined will be nice to me, and people that those people have also determined will be nice to me." Note that the second clause isn't "will be nice to them." If A trusts B, and B trusts C, but A hates C and B knows that, then the ideal social network would somehow encode that.

Right now, all I can imagine in an O(n^2) operation where, every time you make a friend, you mark a subset of your friends as their peripheral friends. There's gotta be a better way than that.

docgnome• 16 years ago

> The psychological harm can be great. Just think of how many “heros” have killed themselves following the high levels of publicity they received.

This comment seem a little over the top to me, but all in all, as someone who has used Facebook for a grand total of an hour over a year ago, I found it to be a very interesting article.

natrius6• 16 years ago

"...Zuckerberg believes that people will be better off if they make themselves transparent. Not only that, society will be better off."

I happen to agree with this. Most of the thoughts that people share with each other are completely harmless. Allowing those to be visible by everyone helps us to learn more about ourselves and our society. It's a good default as long as people are aware of what they're doing. Even if people realize what their default settings are (which I think most people understood when they were being set but might have forgotten), there should be a visible reminder of who you're sharing with to minimize mistakes.

We currently live in a private-by-default society, and changing that would be a good thing.

kareemm5• 16 years ago

> We currently live in a private-by-default society, and changing that would be a good thing.

To what? A public-by-default?

Do you tell your parents about your sex life?

Or share your health updates with your co-workers?

Or something more innocuous - do you tell your friends how much money you make?

Even if you answered yes to these questions, recognize that the decision to share that information belongs to the individual, not anybody else.

natrius6• 16 years ago

"To what? A public-by-default?"

Yes.

I share some of those things you mentioned, and I think our society would be better off if it were more acceptable to do so. However, those are absurd examples to bring up in this discussion. Few shared those things on Facebook even when it was friends-only. In the context of things people typically share on Facebook, public-by-default is perfectly appropriate.

Even if people did share those things privately on Facebook, we're talking about defaults. Out of all the things people share on Facebook, a small fraction of posts actually need to be private in the eyes of their authors. The default settings should reflect that, and people should restrict privacy when they need to.

"...recognize that the decision to share that information belongs to the individual, not anybody else."

No one has suggested otherwise.

philwelch3• 16 years ago

Privacy is kind of an arbitrary culture-dependent thing, which means (optimistically) that we can and should rationally evaluate what kind of culture we want to live in and work towards it.

Personally I only keep things private for two reasons:

1. I am ashamed of them. I would like to keep private when I make a mistake or lose emotional control. This is just vanity and it's small of me to want to keep these things private.

2. For the courtesy of others. People don't want to hear about my sex life so I don't tell them. People don't want to see my naked body so I wear clothes. That's related to privacy but different because the issue is letting people filter the information they consume, not the information they publish, and privacy is more about letting people filter the information they publish.

kixxauth• 16 years ago

I have truly enjoyed watching Facebook and Zuck get called out by mainstream media and members of congress. It's not just the geeks who care anymore. T -5 days until my account is deleted.

http://www.google.com/trends?q=delete+facebook+account

zbanks• 16 years ago

Well...

http://www.google.com/trends?q=delete+facebook+account,+face...

This seems to suggest that fewer people are searching to delete their account, proportional to the number of people using facebook.

ggchappell• 16 years ago

2 passages to note:

> Youth are actually much more concerned about exposure than adults these days. Why? Probably because they get it. And it’s why they’re using fake names ....

Well, I'm glad they're concerned. However, there's getting it, and then there's getting it.

I'm definitely on the adult end of things (I'm 44). I tended to use made-up names in net discussions until relatively recently. But I consistently found myself tempted to make comments that I would not want my real identity to be associated with. So, when I got my HN account in early '09, I used an abbreviation of my real name, as a reminder to myself that I shouldn't say anything I would not want to be associated with (and also that there is a good chance that even "anonymous" comments could be traced to the real me someday).

And that seems to me (in my arrogance?) to be a rather deeper level of "getting it" than that attained by many of the above-mentioned youth using fake names.

> Over and over again, I find that people’s mental model of who can see what doesn’t match up with reality.

Definitely. And this is not a new phenomenon at all. I remember reading the Usenet group misc.kids back in the 90s, and being shocked at all the personal details of children's lives that some parents were posting, often under apparently real names. The newsgroup was being treated as a neighborhood mothers gossip group, not as something that the whole world could see, and that would be archived forever.

EDIT. And a third passage:

> The battle that is underway is not a battle over the future of privacy and publicity. It’s a battle over choice and informed consent.

An excellent point, and one that needs to be made more often. Despite what the article says, the statement "young people don't care about privacy" might indeed be true, in general. However, even if it is, that does not mean it is okay to make privacy-related decisions for them. And it certainly does not mean it is okay to invade their privacy by means of trickery and deceit.

lvecsey• 16 years ago

I think people try to use his age against him. But too bad. It's his company and let him run it the way he wants.

Particularly if it goes against the old, ingrained ways of thinking I'm all the more for it.

andywood• 16 years ago

I like this comment. When I was younger, I used to think a whole lot more about all the different ways that things could be. As I got older, I very slowly realized just how immovable most of the rest of society is. Gradually, I came to accept the way people are as "reality", which I found necessary to do in order to make a living and have friends. But I think in some ways I had a much larger perspective when I was younger.

doron2• 16 years ago

I had a facebook account for a good while, was lazy enough to have used it to authenticate to this very site. I was always somewhat troubled by the way the site privacy system morphed overtime, but it served a great utility for me especially in my social event management, so I let sleeping dogs lie.

As I investigated it more (admittedly since social graph announcement and other developments of late ) I decided to remove my account.

My decision was based in part due the fact that I have friends and colleagues who do not enjoy the relative safety both political, and social, that I enjoy as an educated white American citizen of heterosexual persuasion. In a sense I feel that it is irresponsible of me to possibly "out" a friend by accident just because it is a non issue for me.

I find the statements attributed to Zuckerberg profoundly distressing and ignorant of the world we live in, you don't have to go far to find people who maintain different identities so they can merely survive. it is a lack of intellectual integrity on his part.

philwelch3• 16 years ago

I don't think Zuckerberg--or the idea of transparency--is as naive or ignorant as you point it. It may ultimately be a bad idea but for deeper reasons than "they never thought of people with unusual lifestyles who may be oppressed because of them".

Here's the argument: people keep secrets because people keep secrets. Those of us who have different sexual orientations and make other non-traditional lifestyle choices keep it secret because it's socially taboo, but it's socially taboo only because we continue keeping it secret. We'd be better off if that was broken down, but you don't want to be the first one coming out of the closet. Thanks to game theory we're all worse off. That's why you need to change the game. 20 years ago you'd be shocked to find that your uncle was in a gay polyamorous relationship. The idea is to build a world where you won't care because you'll know two dozen gay people and two dozen polyamorous people.

doron2• 16 years ago

The idea of transparency resonates with me, but to attribute a lack character to people who do not live and have the opportunity the Mr Zuckerberg enjoys is something i find abhorrent.

Transparency starts at home, Facebook is not a transparent organization, if his ideals call for it, he should be the first in line, and his business should tag along. his case would look better if he led by example.

alanh• 16 years ago

Read the whole post. Danah Boyd always writes very insightfully about social networks and their real-world users and implications. She delivers again here.

philk• 16 years ago

You have one identity. The days of you having a different image for your work friends or co-workers and for the other people you know are probably coming to an end pretty quickly. Having two identities for yourself is an example of a lack of integrity. --Zuckerberg, 2009

Zuckerberg has no business discussing "a lack of integrity" other than his own.

Facebook and “radical transparency”

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