By Sree Sreenivasan
DNAinfo Contributing Editor
For several months now, I've been saying Facebook is both under-appreciated and under-criticized.
What's under-appreciated is the enormous influence Facebook has in how friends (the real and the Facebook kind) and family members connect these days; its role in which news items and civic issues get wider attention; and how it's even giving peace a chance (see peace.facebook.com to see how it makes opens communications between people who otherwise might not get to talk at all).
I wrote about some of these positive attributes in February for Facebook's sixth birthday. Since then, its influence has grown (an estimated 100 million people since earlier this year; see checkfacebook.com to track the numbers; meanwhile, Google has released stats showing Facebook is the No. 1 site on the web).
In that same column, I also discussed the privacy issues created by Facebook's ever-changing policies:
In its relentless pursuit of more publicly available content and the
resulting equivalent with page views, FB risks alienating some of its
biggest fans. I, for one, have been hitting the Like button a lot less
often than I used to.
As it takes on Twitter, Google Buzz and whatever else might be coming down the pike, FB can be optimistic about its ability to remain the #1 social network in the world, thanks to its simplicity, ease-of-use and enormous user base. But it cannot afford, however, to be complacent about privacy issues in our ever more open world.
And then things got worse. In April, Facebook took steps to open up user content even more, causing much confusion (for example, it replaced "Fan" pages - which I disliked anyway - with "Like" pages, using a term that already meant something else on the system).
Since then, a steady drumbeat of criticism has been heard from privacy advocates, lawmakers, and in the media, including a New York Times front-page story that showed Facebook's privacy policy was longer than the U.S. Constitution, without the amendments; a Time cover story that showed how Facebook is redefining privacy; a Newsweek columnist wrote about quitting Facebook.
Speaking of quitting, yesterday, May 31, was "Quit Facebook Day," which encouraged users to, well, quit the service.
"If you agree that Facebook doesn't respect you, your personal data or the future of the web, you may want to join us," says the multilingual site, QuitFacebookDay.com. About 30,000 "committed Facebook quitters" had signed up, but even if all those quitters quit, their departure will have no effect on Facebook's growth, which has hundreds of thousands of new sign-ups a day.
Perhaps it was a coincidence, but last week, Facebook sought to reduce the temperature around its privacy policies. Over a four-day period, a company not known for saying much, essentially asked for a do-over.
First, on Sunday, May 23, founder Mark Zuckerberg, wrote (and later gave
permission to share) a note to tech maven Robert Scoble where he admitted, "I know we've made a bunch of mistakes."
The next day's Washington Post carried an op-ed by Zuckerberg in which he said the company was listening, and responding to, "recent concerns" (no mystery about how the piece ended up in the Post: Chairman Donald Graham is on Facebook's board of directors).
Then, on Wednesday, May 26, Facebook announced changes coming to the privacy policy and a detailed privacy guide. These changes are being rolled out across the system and all users are expected to have them by the end of this week.
Facebook has promised the following:
* You have control over how your information is shared.
* We do not share your personal information with people or services you
don't want.
* We do not give advertisers access to your personal information.
* We do not and never will sell any of your information to anyone.
* We will always keep Facebook a free service for everyone.
I think this is a good start, and if the service manages to keep its word it will become bigger than any of us can imagine. If it doesn't, its growth will slow and other, more nimble and consumer-friendly services will eat away at it.
I asked Alex Howard, Government 2.0 correspondent for O'Reilly Media and a thoughtful technology analyst, about Facebook and privacy. He replied, in part:
Fundamentally, human relationships are about trust. If we cannot trust that the manner in which we connect, filter and share information with one another will not change with the business needs of a platform, our
relationships will be damaged. We have only to look at the statistics on jobs lost, applications denied and romances sunk through virtual actions to understand how those consequences may play out in our offline lives.
As Facebook continues to wrestle with these and other issues, we need to keep an eye on how it evolves, particularly with regards to our private information.
What do you think of all the changes at Facebook? Let me know in the comments or via Twitter @sreenet.
Each week, DNAinfo contributing editor Sree Sreenivasan, a Columbia
Journalism School professor, shares his observations about the changing
media landscape.
