Facebook: Too early, too late

Facebook has announced it's new privacy settings today. It is too early to say what (if any) impact this will have. It is also too late for Facebook to be trusted. From what I hear, I don't yet see a basic change in Facebooks understanding of peoples view of privacy. I also think that the assumption that people are willing to relinquish their privacy just to get a free or convenient service is incorrect. Look at the Buzz fiasco: in a nutshell, Google connected a service which contained private information (gmail) with a public service (buzz).

For many, Facebook was a service for private information. Sharing was for group of select people. One of the issues was that people with 4,000 so-called friends are not the same as people with 40 friends. For the former Facebook was the same as Buzz or Twitter - a megaphone; for the latter, facebook was the same as gmail or hotmail - a telephone. Expectations and usage were highly different.

In addition, all social networks are facing the same issue. Social networks try and look like our social circles, but they have a hard time to implement them. Just consider whom you will invite to your wedding, your child's graduation, a reunion or a political meeting. In real life we do it almost intuitively, but when facing a computer application we need to define, allocate and assign every person and even. Computers do not handle nuances, white lies, sarcasm or irony very well. Even in corporate environments, where access to information should be well defined and constructed, this is a sisyphean task. For some, this is simply too much work and they fail back to statements such as "it's too late, there is no longer anonymity" or "you can't join a social network and complain about privacy".

Two anecdotes came to me. 

• A friend once told me he does not care for privacy, and as far as he was concerned his gmail account can be projected on a large screen at the city square. I wondered what his corespondents would has thought of that.
• A family member pointed out to me that on his last trip abroad he called his wife and asked what was shopping for in the pharmacy that morning. He was simply checking his bank statement on-line and saw that transaction.

Those two anecdotes follow the assumption that anything transmitted via the internet is open to all, via sharing or data leaks. We do not, however, make those assumptions when delivering the same information via phone, fax or the post office. The same it true of conversations we have with a groups or friends or family members. If our phone is tapped or our mail opened we will take legal action, if a friend or a family member will abuse our trust we will probably remove them from our social circle.

Social networks in general, and facebook in particular, have created problem. We are tapped all the time, and we are dependent on our friends technical understanding in maintaining our privacy and reputation. While we might expect the social network (or other service provider) to use advertising to maintain their service, and we might agree that targeted advertisement are more lucrative then banner ads, there are ways to provide this without exposing our personal information. Moreover, the more we know on how this information is used, we can provide more (or less) information.

Facebook is facing a huge challenge, not only in regaining trust, but also in the drab IT work of deploying and teaching it's users. Sure, there are a lot of sites that will tell you how to control you privacy, but this is not enough. Facebook should endorse and support such sites.

There is hope yet. Facebook can be wonderful platform, but it is still to early to tell if it's not too late.