10. Facebook's Terms Of Service are completely one-sided
Facebook's Terms Of Service state that not only
do they own your data (section 2.1), but if you don't keep it up to date
and accurate (section 4.6), they can terminate your account (section
14). You could argue that the terms are just protecting Facebook's
interests, and are not in practice enforced, but in the context of their
other activities, this defense is pretty weak.
9. Facebook makes it incredibly difficult to truly delete your account
It's
one thing to make data public or even mislead users about doing so; but
where I really draw the line is that, once you decide you've had
enough, it's pretty tricky to really delete your account.
They make no promises about deleting your data and every application
you've used may keep it as well. On top of that, account deletion is
incredibly (and intentionally) confusing. When you go to your account
settings, you're given an option to deactivate your account, which turns
out not to be the same thing as deleting it. Deactivating means you can
still be tagged in photos and be spammed by Facebook (you actually have
to opt out of getting emails as part of the deactivation, an incredibly
easy detail to overlook, since you think you're deleting your account).
Finally, the moment you log back in, you're back like nothing ever
happened! In fact, it's really not much different from not logging in
for awhile. To actually delete your account, you have to find a link
buried in the on-line help (by "buried" I mean it takes five clicks to
get there). Or you can just click here. Basically, Facebook is trying to
trick their users into allowing them to keep their data even after
they've "deleted" their account.
8. Facebook has flat out declared war on privacy
Founder and CEO of Facebook, in defense of Facebook's privacy changes
last January: "People have really gotten comfortable not only sharing
more information and different kinds, but more openly and with more
people. That social norm is just something that has evolved over time."
More recently, in introducing the Open Graph API: "... the default is
now social." Essentially, this means Facebook not only wants to know
everything about you, and own that data, but to make it available to
everybody. Which would not, by itself, necessarily be unethical, except
that ...
7. Facebook is pulling a classic bait-and-switch
At the same time that they're telling developers how to access your data with new APIs, they are relatively quiet about explaining the implications
of that to members. What this amounts to is a bait-and-switch. Facebook
gets you to share information that you might not otherwise share, and
then they make it publicly available. Since they are in the business of
monetizing information about you for advertising purposes, this amounts
to tricking their users into giving advertisers information about
themselves. This is why Facebook is so much worse than Twitter in this
regard: Twitter has made only the simplest (and thus, more credible)
privacy claims and their customers know up front that all their tweets
are public. It's also why the FTC is getting involved, and people are
suing them (and winning).
Check out this excellent timeline from the EFF documenting the changes to Facebook's privacy policy.
6. Facebook is a bully
When Pete Warden demonstrated just how this bait-and-switch works
(by crawling all the data that Facebook's privacy settings changes had
inadvertently made public) they sued him. Keep in mind, this happened
just before they announced the Open Graph API and stated that the
"default is now social." So why sue an independent software developer
and fledgling entrepreneur for making data publicly available when
you're actually already planning to do that yourself? Their real agenda
is pretty clear: they don't want their membership to know how much data
is really available. It's one thing to talk to developers about how
great all this sharing is going to be; quite another to actually see
what that means in the form of files anyone can download and load into
MatLab.
5. Even your private data is shared with applications
At this point, all your data is shared with applications
that you install. Which means now you're not only trusting Facebook,
but the application developers, too, many of whom are too small to worry
much about keeping your data secure. And some of whom might be even
more ethically challenged than Facebook. In practice, what this means is
that all your data - all of it - must be effectively considered public,
unless you simply never use any Facebook applications at all. Coupled
with the OpenGraph API, you are no longer trusting Facebook, but the
Facebook ecosystem.
4. Facebook is not technically competent enough to be trusted
Even
if we weren't talking about ethical issues here, I can't trust
Facebook's technical competence to make sure my data isn't hijacked. For
example, their recent introduction of their "Like" button makes it
rather easy for spammers to gain access to my feed and spam my social
network. Or how about this gem for harvesting profile data?
These are just the latest of a series of Keystone Kops mistakes, such
as accidentally making users' profiles completely public, or the
cross-site scripting hole that took them over two weeks to fix. They
either don't care too much about your privacy or don't really have very
good engineers, or perhaps both.
3. Facebook's CEO has a documented history of unethical behavior
From the very beginning of Facebook's existence, there are questions about Zuckerberg's ethics.
According to BusinessInsider.com, he used Facebook user data to guess
email passwords and read personal email in order to discredit his
rivals. These allegations, albeit unproven and somewhat dated,
nonetheless raise troubling questions about the ethics of the CEO of the
world's largest social network. They're particularly compelling given
that Facebook chose to fork over $65M to settle a related lawsuit
alleging that Zuckerberg had actually stolen the idea for Facebook.
2. Facebook doesn't (really) support the Open Web
The
so-called Open Graph API is named so as to disguise its fundamentally
closed nature. It's bad enough that the idea here is that we all pitch
in and make it easier than ever to help Facebook collect more data about
you. It's bad enough that most consumers will have no idea that this
data is basically public. It's bad enough that they claim to own this
data and are aiming to be the one source for accessing it. But then they
are disingenuous enough to call it "open," when, in fact, it is
completely proprietary to Facebook. You can't use this feature unless
you're on Facebook. A truly open implementation would work with
whichever social network we prefer, and it would look something like
OpenLike. Similarly, they implement just enough of OpenID to claim they
support it, while aggressively promoting a proprietary alternative,
Facebook Connect.
1. The Facebook application itself sucks
Between
the farms and the mafia wars and the "top news" (which always guesses
wrong - is that configurable somehow?) and the myriad privacy settings
and the annoying ads (with all that data about me, the best they can
apparently do is promote dating sites, because, uh, I'm single) and the
thousands upon thousands of crappy applications, Facebook is almost
completely useless to me at this point. Yes, I could probably customize
it better, but the navigation is ridiculous, so I don't bother. (And,
yet, somehow, I can't even change colors or apply themes or do anything
to make my page look personalized.) Let's not even get into how slowly
your feed page loads. Basically, at this point, Facebook is more
annoying than anything else.
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