Does Facebook hate privacy?

don't get that one because you haven't seen that movie. Yeah, you don't even know what I'm talking about. Our listeners do because they like Jaws. All right. So before we get into this, I just wanted to thank some listeners. We had several people right in and ask us about the topic we're gonna tackle today, and I have a list of folks that I want to go through really quickly. So for Bradley, Ryan, Ian, Nate Vincent, David, Susie Gerald, Mike John and probably more, this podcast is for you. Wow.

Thanks for that long distance dedication, Casey. Yeah, and that was just from our email. There are probably more on Facebook and probably more on Twitter, because everyone wants to know about Facebook and privacy. So we're in. We have decided to title this podcast does Facebook Hate Privacy? And as I normally insert our silly jokes at that point in the conversation, I should say, no, actually, that's a complicated question. Yeah, for one thing we talked about, right,

that's a good point. Actually, Petty, I'm glad that you because I was about to just go on and I had just said before we started recording that we should mention that Polette's the one who remembered thank you. Um yes about back in two thousand nine, Back in October, we did a podcast about Facebook applications and your privacy and the complicated relationship there about how if you install apps in your Facebook profile, you are essentially giving third

party act says to your profile information. And at the time, there was a question about how much of that information was going to these third party developers. In some cases it was just the very basics that the application needed to operate properly, but others it was it was confusing. There was there was way more information going to these developers than you would think would be necessary just to allow you to do whatever the app was designed to do.

And some of the developers were sort of had sort of questionable credentials, and there were people going, Okay, wait, what what am I getting here? Um? And you're getting my information? Why why is it that I want to give this virtual puppy to my my girlfriend on her Facebook profile page. Why do you need to know my name, race, my reli religious beliefs, my credit card number? Uh, the names of all my friends? Why do you need all the information if I'm just gonna give a little picture

of a puppy dog. Um. So, So, anyway, that that's the whole app situation, that's a third party situation. We're gonna try and stay away from that in this discussion. We're gonna focus mainly on Facebook itself. Yes. Now, Facebook, of course started as a project for for college students and by college students. Yes, we probably shouldn't get into the murky genesis of this project because there has been much said about who owned what intellectual property and when

and whose idea it really was. Regardless, we know that it came out of a Harvard dorm room, right, So what happened behind the doors of the Harvard door room dorm room is still a mystery. But ultimately Facebook emerged around two yes, so, So originally it's a system for college students to stay in touch with each other. It eventually spreads to other colleges and becomes a larger network, then rolls out the high school students, and then eventually

rolls out to the general public. Um. I think it was two thousand seven when it finally hit the general public, so somewhere around there something like that. So, uh, Originally it seemed fairly sane. At least when you created a profile, the information you created was some of it was publicly viewable on Facebook, and the reason for that was pretty pretty innocent. The whole purpose of a social network is

for you to create connections with other people. Well, you can't really do that if everyone who joins the network is invisible to each other. I mean, there might as well not be anything there, right Well, and uh, and I'll correct myself in saying this. In two thousand four when it actually got started, I mean, the point was it was actually within a very small community. So the point was to you know, make friends and get to

know the people in your closed off community. Right. So, so when you start factoring that, and it makes makes things seem a little less malevolent than you would have people believe from the way things have progressed to the current status. Um. As a matter of fact, if you don't mind my interview, go ahead. Um. The Electronic Frontier Foundation actually has cataloged some information about sort of and chronological order the way that the privacy policy has changed.

And and around two thousand five, Um, you basically somebody had to be in one of your groups on the Facebook dot com. Right, this is when it was the Facebook. I'm not actually doing elite thing there, No, they actually was the Facebook dot com. Um, somebody actually had to be in one of your groups. You had to enable them being in your group for them to actually see your information. So I mean it's by default at that point.

That was the way it worked. Yeah. The most anyone would be able to really be able to to see would be like, uh, your name. And the reason for that is that if you joined the network, you would want to search for your friends and see if they were also on there, so that you could send them a request and you could become connected through this network. Yeah.

I went to a small college. Um, when I was in school, we actually had a campus directory, a paper campus directory that had all of our names and what what room we lived in if we were on campus, or you know, our address for off campus, our email address, you know, and like I said, a photo of us so that you could identify one another. And if you didn't know somebody's last name, there was a list of names in the back, so you could say, you know, Jonathan,

I'm John. What's Jonathan's last name? You could look up, Oh, there's six Jonathans. You could flip through and figure out which one it was. You know it was Jonathan's. Was a small college, well, you know about in the student body tone, so you had you had about fifteen some of your classes at the University of Georgia. I think yea, um, but no, I mean it's the idea already existed in other forms, and I'm sure that that a lot of colleges are like that, you know, even now they have

some kind of campus directory. Yeah, and this was just essentially an online version of that, although it had a little more functionality because it allowed to share photos and other things. So Facebook when it rolls out to the public. When it first started, there were only certain things that we're going to be network wide viewable, right, And again this is this wasn't. There wasn't any bad reason for that. It was also that you could find the people you

know so that you could connect with them online. And that philosophy is pretty innocent. The problem really comes into it when the Facebook starts getting looking into creating a business model. And the real business model for Facebook comes down to advertising. Yes, selling information to advertisers, selling ad space to advertisers. So the more information that you share on Facebook, the more information Facebook has to sell to

people who want to advertise directly to you. Right, and how could this possibly well, clearly now if you're taking it from purely a business perspective. All right, so I'm a businessman, I have it's I'm an a moral businessman, not immoral. I am a moral morals do not factor into my business decisions. Okay, So I'm just looking at the best way to maximize my profits. I have a company where I've got five million people using my product.

I have the option to either let people, as soon as they join my company or become a customer to my company, I have the option to either let them dictate to me which things they want to participate, how much information they want to share with me, or I can make it so that the the the default setting is you share all everything with me until you tell me otherwise. Um. Clearly, if I make my money through information, more information means more money. So my my choice is

going to be, let's go with a default. I want. I want as much information as I possibly can get from all these users because the more information I have, the more money I make. Right now, put yourself, if you will, in the shoes of the advertiser. You want to spend money to advertise a product to our service, and you want to reach as many people as possible. Ideally, you want to reach as many people as possible who

actually have an interest in what you're selling. Right. So the thing is, uh, Facebook offers a very i won't say unique opportunity, but a really awesome opportunity for people to do that because Facebook can say, look, here are a bunch of people living in Omaha, Nebraska, and that's where you do business, and these this subgroup is really interested in buying a new car because you know, we we could tell that they are, you know, getting this,

They're they're interested in, in, uh, looking at cars, they have cars on their likes, things that they have already

thumbed up. We know that they are a certain age, a certain demographic, at least sixteen years old, that kind of thing, and yeah, so we can we can offer you this information, and we're going we'll shoot, Yeah, let's go ahead and and advertise to this particular subgroup of people, because there there's a really much higher chance that somebody in this group is going to buy what it is

that we're going to be selling them. Right, instead of carpet bombing, you're you're you're doing a surgical strike, right, You're you're looking you're narrowing down the huge audience to an audience that is much more likely to respond to your advertising. And so it's called targeted advertising. Yes, you know that you are targeted based upon the information that you share, which kind of classifies you in a way, and it classifies you and actually it classifies you entising

numberless ways. Well that's because you know, for one advertiser, you're classified as a consumer because of a certain set of criteria. For a totally different advertiser, they're still interested in you, but it's for a completely different set of criteria. And and it all is based upon how much information you are sharing on Facebook. Right. So you've got the advertiser who is buying into Facebook saying, you know, here's

some money I have. You have a really great opportunity for me to advertise, you know, I targeted to a targeted audience. Facebook's going, hey, We've got lots of information that you can use to advertise. And then you have the third party, which would be you and me, going hey, wait a minute, what are you doing with my information? Why are you you know, giving away my information to these third party advertisers. Yeah. Actually, I the way I think the best summation I've heard so far about the

entire situation came out of an Internet discussion. It was in a chat room and one person said, and I wish I could remember who it was, but one person summed it up as saying, Facebook's customers are advertisers, yes, Facebook's product are the users, yes, so the users are being sold two advertisers. So you know, normally, when we think of customer and and business operator, we would think, oh, well I have a Facebook account. That means I'm a

Facebook customer. Facebook is providing me a service, and uh, and I'm a customer of that company. But if you look at it from Facebook's perspective, their customer is the advertiser who wants to give the money in return for a certain a certain slice of the users. And so you know, it's it's it's kind of a cold hearted way of looking at it about the same way. That's that's how Facebook is able to make the money it needs to provide this platform for users to to go

and create profiles and interact with one another. I mean, ultimately, if Facebook did not do this, they would have to find some other way to generate enough revenue to support this massive platform. Well, corporations themselves have no feelings. They are, as you pointed out, a moral and uh, you know, the law does treat them as people. So essentially that's that's who we're talking about. But they don't they don't really,

you know, there's no offense. It's just business. And Facebook is a private company right now, so they don't have shareholders looking to them to maximize value. Yeah, so if face if and when Facebook goes public, because they've talked about going public but have not given any timeline as to win that might happen. But should Facebook go public, I would say you could expect it to get worse rather than better in the sense that when you when you go public, people purchase stock in the company, and

people want a return on that investment. And usually what that means is they want the company to maximize profits at any opportunity. And in the case of maximizing profits again, since Facebook is in the business of selling information of users to advertisers, that means that that situation is just gonna get worse. Let's talk a little bit about all right, Let's say that you were to create a Facebook profile today the default setting if you did not tweak any

privacy settings. That's really where the big brew haha is brewing right now. Yeah, it started out as a kerfuffle, but it is now a full blown Yeah. Yeah, it was moved up. Yeah, we have definitely gone to brew haha. For um, we're almost at rush moving pictures. Yes, get that joke. So originally, if you had created a Facebook profile, stuff that would get shared with the network would be

like your name, right. Everything else would be contained within your your group of friends or the immediate network that you belong to. So for example, the school you went to, like back when it was a college only thing, right, So there'll be certain things that by default everyone could see, which would be essentially your your name so that they

could look you up. Everything else, they would have to either be your friend or have to be within your immediate network to see the information like maybe your your photos or whatever, or your status updates. Well, here we go back to the the e f f's timeline. UM. In two thousand six, the comp the Facebook said basically that, uh,

you know, yes, you have some control over your privacy. Uh, you people in your school and in your local area, we'll be able to see who you are, but otherwise no, And then in two thousand seven, uh, they said they would start sharing your name and your photo and your school name. You know, this is as it was making the transition into a public, uh social networking site. UM, unless you said you didn't want to do that, but that was the default was you know, name, photo and

the school that you're going to. And uh, then that's when everything started to change. In two thousand nine ish and two thousand nine was when they tried to launch Beacon Beacon. Beacon Beacon began. You've made that same joke the last time, but I always think it okay, So anyway, the because I listened to the last one before we

did this one. So it's been nine months. Beacon, what was the the arrangement Facebook had with other websites where you would go if you were a customer on the other website and you happen to have been logged into Facebook and didn't log out, you go, so you go over let's say like Amazon. So you go to Amazon, you buy a book. Normally, if you wanted to share that information, you would go back to Facebook and say, Hey, I just bought such and such book I can't wait

to read it. Beacon, you don't have to do that, because Bacon was enabled, it would tell everybody automatically what you purchased. Yeah. So, and if you're buying you know, like uh, Terry Pratchett's The Color of Magic, you know, you might not mind the fact that's being shared with all your friends. In fact, I would suggest that you do tell everybody that you bought that. But let's say you purchased Living with Cancer and you had not told anyone that you had cancer, or that someone you love

has cancer, and that's the book. You bought the book for someone else. That is the kind of information you might not necessarily want to immediately go to your Facebook profile and be shared with everyone else on Facebook. Um, the Beacon ended up going away after a class action lawsuit. I was kind of scuttled in two thousand In September two thousand nine, Uh, it's kind of slowly crept back

in a different form, um Well. Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of the company and founder, Uh well contentiously saying yes, the the the founder is basically saying that, Um, you know, he had issued an apology when Beacon went away, saying, you know, we did this the wrong way, and that kind of suggested at the time that it was going to come back in some form. Yeah. He And and it's it's a little bit more of an opt in situation before it was opt out. And we'll get into

a little bit of that in a second. So let's say you create a You've created a profile right now, the default setting right now, everything all of your information by default is public, except for your contact information, which remains only visible to you and your friends by default, and your birthday, which remains visible only to you, your

friends and your friends of friends by default. But everything else, like the friends you have, the networks you belong to, your status updates, the things that you like, your pictures, your all of that will be public um by default. Right. So that means that even if you've just created your

profile today and you haven't tweaked any settings. Uh, someone who has never met you before, doesn't You don't know this person, you don't want them to be your Facebook friend, could go to your profile and see practically all the information you've put down so far except for your contact

info and your birthday. That is kind of creepy, yep. Now, Facebook had received lots and lots of complaints when it when essentially moved to this model, and their response was to overhaul their privacy settings um a couple of times actually, and by the time this comes out, who knows, it

may have been overhauled again. It happened earlier in two thousand and ten, and I think that's that's when it went into a full fledged breujaha because they really opened up more information and Mark Zuckerberg had essentially said at the time, Look, you know, this is a social networking site.

You're supposed to be social. Why would you want to be keep your information private if you joined the site to network with people, which is and we we've Chris and I talked about this the other day just in a in a a brief conversation, you think about two different archetypical Facebook users. You've got one type of Facebook user who has no real concern about privacy. Uh, not that they're ignorant about it, just that they don't really that's not a issue. Yeah, it's not an issue. So

they're fine with sharing everything. They want to meet as many people as possible. They're very social and they want to maximize that impact on Facebook. So they're willing to not just make connections with friends, but they want complete strangers to be able to see their information because who knows the complete stranger it might just be their next

best friend. Then you've got the other type of Facebook user, who is someone who sees the value of Facebook, but wants to use Facebook to stay in touch with a very specific group of people. And beyond the group of people, this person has really no interest in Facebook. They don't

want to use Facebook to meet new people. They don't even necessarily want folks that folks they know to be able to find them on Facebook easily, because in some cases it might be folks they don't particularly like, and you don't want to have to deal with online harassment if you already had to deal with it in person. So so this kind of Facebook user, uh doesn't want that default of sharing everything with everyone. This Facebook user wants to be able to keep that as much information

shared with just the immediate group of friends as possible. Yes. Uh. And it's kind of interesting because Chris sort of represents not not quite that level of Facebook user, but not too far from that Facebook user, and I represent kind of not the hey, look at me Facebook user, but I'm closer to that side than the other. Yeah, we we For the purposes of the argument we were talking

about extremes um. And however, both Chris and I both agree that Facebook's approach is the wrong one to have, because the right approach would be that you give the user the option to opt in to what he or she wants to um to share at the very beginning. Well, privacy advocates agree with us. UM. And the thing is, I think it would just this, this is my personal opinion. I think it would engender more trust in Facebook as

a company. If Facebook said, sure, you know, why don't you start out private, meet some people you know, and as you gradually get used to this and like it more. Then you can open yourself up to more and more people. They do have a lot of very attractive functions on the website. You know, the gaming community is thriving and other applications are are doing very well too. There are things that keep you there on the site there. You know,

in in web terms, they're called sticky. It's very sticky website. And you know, it would be very good for them to engender trust by doing this, but a lot of people are distrusting Facebook right now because they say, hey, look, you're just open. You're here, that's the deal. Now we should say that you can go into privacy settings and adjust your privacy settings so that you do have the

experience that say Chris would want. You can have the experience where you you restrict your information to just your group of friends and no one beyond that, and then you have much more control of your information. And that's a good thing. And I actually do follow that for most of my information. Very little of my information is actually shared with the entire network. Most of it is friends or friends of friends at most, and some of

it's just me. I don't I don't share information beyond you know, I like, I have it in there so that if I ever one day to sign to change it, I can, But I don't share it outside of I don't. It's just it's just there in the account. So things like my phone number, for example, I don't share that with anyone, even my my closest friends. Um So in that sense, uh, you know, Facebook is doing a good job.

But what would be better is that Let's say that you create your Facebook account today, and then as part of the account creation process, it then took you to privacy settings and it allowed you to choose which things you wanted to share automatically, so you would check boxes to share stuff. Right now, it's the opposite way. Think of all the boxes as being checked and you have to unchecked things. That's that's the opting out to opt

in creates. I think opting in is better because it means that you've made a conscious decision to share that information, and that would be the more responsible way to to move for your users. And but again, as we pointed out, Facebook's customers are the advertisers, not the users. So that's probably why Facebook's a little reluctant to to take that route where where you leave that in the user's hands. It's you know, the way Facebook status uh stances right now.

They could the company can say, well, sure, the default is you share everything, but you can change that at any time. I don't see what the problem is, you know, as opposed to saying that the default is you don't share it with anyone outside of your group of friends

unless you choose to. You know. It's uh, it's funny because since they have revised their settings a couple of times in two thousand in ten, um, you know, they actually in their most recent change back in May, they Facebook actually went to the trouble of simplifying the settings, uh so that you could understand it a little bit better, and they restored some of the missing settings that they

had removed before. Um. But privacy advocates are not letting up. Um. People are still giving them a hard time, and uh, you know, I think that the company sort of expected that once they made these changes that this would all sort of blow over, that the heat would go away. But it's not, and there's still a lot of people upset. In fact, on May thirty one, two thousand ten, there was a an official quit Facebook Day, which unfortunately was

the wrong day to hold it people. I think they would have had way more people leave if they had not held it on what in the United States is Memorial Day. That's probably the reason I say that is because it's a lot easier to quit something that's computer related when you're sitting in front of your computer instead of by the barbecue. Exactly, if they had done that on June one, when everyone is back in front of the computer, get people easily nearly doubling the number, they

could have had a much bigger impact. I think. I think having it on a holiday was a mistake. Holidays and weekends, that's a mistake. You should do it on a weekday when people are trying to avoid schoolwork or workwork. Um. But that that that illustrates, So I don't I don't think it would have been anywhere near the uh four million. Maybe that's a lot of people or a lot of accounts.

I'm sure some people have multiple accounts, but um um, but yeah, thats just imagining that only thirty one people were that upset, you know, I'm I'm inclined to say that they are probably more people who are that upset enough to actually quit. The thing is Facebook is an extremely h sticky website, and people do want to stay. I think it's really useful they want to stay. They just want Facebook to behave in a way that feels

more responsible towards the user. I just wonder how how long Facebook is going to feel as though it can get away with selling people's information and defaulting people to fully public. We should also also mention that we're recording this podcast shortly after the d eight um conference, and Zuckerberg took the stage for a question and answer session, UH and was not very comfortable during it. I think

it's safe to say that, Um. He was asked point blank a couple of times about facebook stance on privacy and their their philosophy toward privacy, and he was very

evasive and uncomfortable, I would say, trying to answer those questions. Um. Ultimately, the answers kind of came across as as suggesting that that privacy is not something that it's it's like not even it's not that they ignore it, it's that I think the future is that privacy won't be as important to the average person on the Internet, and it may be that they're trying to push for that future a little hard, right now trying to get there a little

faster than they would naturally. Um, but saying that out loud is almost like suicide. So Zuckerberg did his best to kind of dance around it and not address the issue. Well, Facebook is hardly the only Internet company to to cause

writers to write the headline privacy is dead. I've seen it in a number of places now, and heck Google kind of gets that too, especially after the Google buzz kerfuffle ha ha, Yeah that was that did not quite reach bruhaha levels because not enough people had noticed what the heck buzz was really clue well that in it and it happened on the very first day. Um, that's

a bad first day. But I don't know, you know what, we should get people to write us on Facebook on our you know tex stuff hs W Facebook account until I do think privacy is dead on the Internet. Yeah, Actually I am curious to hear. I would like to hear what you listeners think about the issue of privacy and the Internet. Is it dead? Is it Is it a good thing? That's if it is dead? Is that a good thing or is that a bad thing? And what can we expect the future to look like? On

the internet. Uh, with with privacy kind of taking a back seat. Yeah. Yeah, And and it's you know, I think a lot of people think that it's over with their the age of of being private totally private anyway is uh has gone. So I'd like, I'd like to hear what people think. I agree, So keep an eye out. We'll try and post something on the Facebook page when this this podcast goes live, so that you can respond to that if you like UH and UH, or you can do like our friends c H did send this

a little listener mail. You like how I did that? So this is h H says about our two hundred years of innovations. He says, you missed one. Guys you live in Atlanta. I challenge you to go outside around two in the afternoon for an hour so and not include air conditioning on your list. Great show as always, Thanks c H from Little Rock, Arkansas. You know, at H, that's a good point. Air conditioning is very important. My my only uh, my only counter to that would be outside.

That's that's your problem. It's inside when the air conditioning is all. Considering that I've been spending the last seven weekends out in the Georgia, heat and a DOUBLET. I value every single second of air conditioning I can experience. Yes, thanks a lot, s H. If any of you want to write us, our address is tech Stuff at how stuff works dot com and we will talk to you again,

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