Facebook have broken the implicit contract with us

social media,For several years now I have been extolling the virtues of social networking to friends, family and clients... all of whom have had varying degrees of ludditeness (or should that be 'luddity'?).

One of the main issues that the laggards complained of was the lack of privacy in systems like Facebook.  I, in defence of the networks, would explain how:

1. you can control your own privacy settings;
2. you get the benefits of relevant advertising rather than, for example, the blanket-bombing style of advertising on TV and in newspapers; and
3. if someone wanted to find out things about you, they could do that through various databases anyway.

After listening to the wonderful podcasts from This Week in Google and also seeing an article on LifeHacker however, I realise that not all internet companies are run by nice people.  Not all internet companies try (even if occaisionally unsuccessfully) to 'Not be evil' ... as Google claims publicly to be.  Not all internet companies care about 'us' the users, but are more concerned, as with the old paradigms of stockholders and maximising shareholder value, of making as much money as they can, in anyway they can.

It is, if you like, akin to selling cigarettes to children.  The kids think they're cool and don't have the nous to realise the long term damage tobacco can cause.

And so, thanks to TWiG, I learn that Facebook are changing their systems so that they (and eventually the advertisers) can track Facebook users across the internet, tracking what sites they visit, what they do there, what they purchase and so on.


Of course there are ways to opt-out of the tracking, but that's the problem. It is all 'opt-out' rather than 'opt-in'... and one has to spend quite a lot of time trying to define one's privacy settings (see my own settings below):

There's a good little time-line from the Electronic Frontier Foundation that shows how Facebook have gone from benign to malignant.

Furthermore, if you decide you've had enough of the pernicious attempt by Facebook to control your online life and you want to cancel your account... well good luck! It can be done, but you need to be patient and go through many pages of settings and prompts before achieving that end.

So now I'm stuck.  I still see huge value in social networking and Enterprise 2.0 in general, but how can I guide the laggards over the threshold and embrace the benefits of the new systems, when the most famous brand of them all is trying to screw them?


And perhaps we need more transparency across the board... how many other brands in the social media-verse are tracking our every move and collating data that may come back to bite us?

Not for nothing did I recently install software that will allow me to hide my IP, but will that be enough? If they're personally identifying me, it doesn't matter at all what computer I'm on.

Maybe I'll pack it all in and go back to books, pen and paper... so long as no one copies my notes...