danah boyd: As Fred Stutzman noted, Facebook Broke Its Culture this week. In an attempt to provide something that would make people’s lives easier, they created a privacy trainwreck.
Both my kids have Facebooks. Both my kids don’t like the Mini-Feed changes. But what I hear from my kids is a quite different story than what I see out on the blogosphere.
Neither of my kids are concerned about the privacy implications. Not one bit. They are quite happy with the privacy controls made available to them.
They simply don’t want to be pelted with notifications that Suzy Classmate went from Single to “It’s complicated” or Joe Acquaintance joined the group “CHANGE FACEBOOK BACK”.
Now it seems that Mark Zuckerberg bowed to public pressure and allowed users to control what they publish. What I don’t see yet is the ability for people to control what level of notifications that they are subscribed to.
A while back, I stopped using every social networking tool. I still get invites (mostly from LinkedIn), which I ignore. I suspect that it is this same level of granularity which I seek. I don’t care of the whole world knows my employment status or marital status, but the set of people for which I care about changes in employment status and the set of people for which I care about changes in marital status don’t completely overlap.
The Facebook Revolt
It’s interesting to watch the saga of the Facebook Revolt unfold. The extent of the revolt is incredible. According to the Facebook Stalker City site, over half a million Facebook members have joined the “Students against Facebook News Feed” group....
In Danah’s followup essay she makes a good point of stressing both problems - the privacy aspect and the one which your kids complain about, which she calls “invasion”.
(Full disclosure: I work for Webshots, which is a sort of competitor to Facebook.) When the “Facebook Fiasco” started, I felt a little uneasy. Everybody I knew, and most in the blogosphere, were saying what an embarrassment this was for...
Interesting that coinciding with all the recent fuss over Facebook’s privacy and “invasion” issues, they’ve announced plans to drop membership restrictions. Seems there’ll be additional uproar about Facebook expanding its membership to a wider community.
Also: Sam, apologies for my recent LinkedIn invite; did not realize you’d “stopped using every social networking tool” and I was just starting to populate my network. I’m curious — why did you stop using social networking tools?
apologies for my recent LinkedIn invite; did not realize you’d “stopped using every social networking tool” and I was just starting to populate my network.
No problem.
I’m curious — why did you stop using social networking tools?
Actually, I stopped sometime in 2004. Two basic reasons:
The social networking tools I was using at the time increased my volume of email.
I personally have very little need for semi-private data housed in places I can’t access.
Thanks for the explanation, Sam. I’m beginning to appreciate the email volume issue already... Perhaps there are some good examples of social networking tools that tap into data you house on your own servers, or otherwise assure appropriate access and privacy. I suppose at a basic level blogs are one such example, though they may provide only a subset of the features offered by Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.