Most of us tell the same lie almost daily: “I have read and agree to the terms of use.” This lie is so common and so institutionalized that there’s even a lively discussion on a religious forum regarding whether or not it constitutes a sin.
It’s not that we don’t care about our privacy. We don’t read these privacy policies and terms and conditions texts because they’re long, dense, and usually written in legalese.
Uncharacteristically, Facebook could be changing all that.
No other site has stirred as much controversy with its privacy policy than Facebook, where users readily share the most intimate details of their lives: who they are in a relationship with, what their beliefs are, who their friends are, even their home addresses and cell phone numbers.
Users share all this information on a website that provides social networking services for free. The naïve expectation is that Facebook won’t do anything with their most personal information. However, Facebook’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg reportedly doesn’t believe in privacy, having declared the concept no longer a “social norm.”
Makes sense. For Zuckerberg, privacy is bad business. His website is a goldmine of personal data that companies shell out big bucks to access. Each time a user opts out of an information-sharing feature, that’s a loss of potential profit for the site. So we can understand why he’d want Facebook’s privacy policy to remain as impenetrable and byzantine as possible.
However, earlier this week a strange and rare thing occurred: Facebook got some positive press regarding privacy issues. The website announced it was rolling out a new easy-to-understand privacy policy that would be readable for those of us who haven’t passed the Bar Exam. The new privacy policy is throwing out the tradional all-text, dense language format and opting instead for a more modern approach to the privacy policy, featuring a FAQ section and more visual and interactive features. It should be noted that this move wasn’t entirely motivated by Facebook itself — it was in part, the company’s response to a U.S. Federal Trade Commission investigation into the site’s privacy policies.
Nevertheless, it was good news for users and good public relations for Facebook.
But, just as quickly as Facebook impressed us, they let us down again. Fewer than 24 hours after their new privacy policy made news, Facebook’s newest controversial plan came out: The site would be sharing users’ home addresses and phone numbers with external sites.
This is a perfect example of the dichotomy that is Facebook. One the one hand, the site embodies the ultimate post advertising engine — it’s the new marketplace of ideas where the best content rises to the top by way of likes and comments, whether that content is branded or not. Targeted ads that one sees based on their own Facebook profile inputs aren’t necessarily a bad thing. Same goes for branded recommendations from friends, like the sponsored stories program.
At the same time, Facebook the brand disappoints in its lack of transparency. Users don’t know about changes until after they’ve already occurred. When Facebook introduced Instant Personalization, for example, users were automatically opted-in and required to navigate the maze of settings to opt-out of sharing their personal information with a slew of external sites.
The privacy versus profit battle rages on. What do you make of it? Which will be the ultimate victor?
(Photo: Data Visualization)