Journalist Farhad Manjoo at Slate recently lampooned the privacy interests of Facebook users, quipping sarcastically that “the very idea of making Facebook a more private place borders on the oxymoronic, a bit like expecting modesty at a strip club”. Funny.
A stripper might seem the archetype of promiscuity but she has a great deal of control over what’s going on. There are strict limits to what she does and moreover, what others including the club are allowed to do to her. Strip club customers are banned from taking photos and exploiting the actors’ exuberance, and only the most unscrupulous club would itself take advantage of the show for secondary purposes.
Facebook offers no such protection to their own members.
While people do need to be prudent on the Internet, the real privacy problem with Facebook is not the promiscuity of some of its members, but the blatant and boundless way that it pirates personal information. Regardless of the privacy settings, Facebook reserves all rights to do anything it likes with PI, behind the backs of even its most reserved users. That is the fundamental and persistent privacy breach. It’s obscene.
Update 5 Dec 2011
Farhad Manjoo took me to task on Twitter and the Slate site [though his comments at Slate have since disappeared] saying I misunderstood the strip club analogy. He said what he really meant was propriety, not modesty: visitors to strip clubs shouldn’t expect propriety and Facebook users shouldn’t expect privacy. But I don’t see how refining the metaphor makes his point any clearer or, to be frank, any less odious. I haven’t been to a lot of strip clubs, but I think that their patrons know pretty much what to expect. Facebook on the other hand is deceptive (and has been officially determined to be so by the FTC). Strip clubs are overt; Facebook is tricky.
Manjoo blames the victims, saying that if people want privacy they shouldn’t use Facebook at all. The headline on his article says users are as much to blame for Facebook’s privacy woes as Mark Zuckerberg. This is just tacit acceptance of a Wild West, everyone-for-themselves morality that runs through so much of the Internet. We should debate the difference between what is and and what ought to be happening on the Internet, rather than accepting rampant piracy of PI and leaving hapless users to their own devices. The sorts of privacy intrusions that Facebook foists on its users are not intrinsic. Facebook doesn’t have to construct biometric templates without the subjects’ permission as soon as someone else tags them in photos, neither does it have to continuously run those biometric templates over third party photo data (probably uploaded for other reasons). Facebook could if it desired delete the biometric templates when users ask for tags to be removed, or at the very least alert users to what’s going on in the backiground with photo tags. If photo tagging was just for the fun of the users, rather than commercial exploitation, Facebook would promise in its Privacy Policy not to put biometric templates to secondary purposes. But no, Facebook doesn’t even mention these things in its Policy.
Some of us — including both Manjoo and me — have realised that everything Facebook does is calculated to extract commercial value from the Personal Information it collects and creates. But I don’t belittle Facebook’s users for falling for the trickery.