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There will eventually be a great turning point on the web when everyone finally understands most of the privacy issues and makes a decision on whether they real
by jpeterson 16y ago
There will eventually be a great turning point on the web when everyone finally understands most of the privacy issues and makes a decision on whether they really want their lives to be private or not. If they go for privacy, Facebook will fizzle out--their business model depends fundamentally on invading privacy. If not, Facebook may just take over the world.
- simon_ 16y agoObviously some people will choose one way and some people the other. And Facebook will continue to serve those that are willing to trade privacy for convenience/connectedness.
- jpeterson 16y agoYou're right, that is obvious. I guess what I'm saying is that it will be a very lopsided split.
- axod 16y agoI'm not sure how you can call that. Also I'd dispute your statement "It's business model fundamentally relies on invading your privacy". Without any invasion of privacy, they can probably make a few hundred million a year from random ads. Using your demographics to target ads better at you probably raises that to a few hundred million more. So IMHO, invading your privacy is in no way necessary for Facebook to operate. It just allows them to optimize a little better.
- Silhouette 16y agoI think you're underestimating the difference in revenue potential between targeted and untargeted advertising. The jury is out on whether Facebook actually has a sustainable advertising revenue anyway, but I'd guess that the potential income probably drops by an order of magnitude if you can't target specific demographics.
- axod 16y agoAny website that has eyeballs has sustainable ad revenue. It's just a matter of how much. Targeted advertising is just icing on the cake.
- Silhouette 16y ago> And Facebook will continue to serve those that are willing to trade privacy for convenience/connectedness. But it won't serve them as well if half their friends aren't there any more. Facebook's biggest strength today is its ubiquity: I am "the awkward one", the odd one out, because I gave up on Facebook a long time ago over privacy concerns. I have noticed over the past few months that I get an increasing number of e-mails from friends, sent to increasingly large numbers of my other friends as well as me, and mentioning that "X is up on Facebook but for the people who aren't...". At this rates, it's going to go back to being easier to send messages over e-mail and host your photos up on something like Flickr, and if that happens, Facebook is probably toast.
- tewks 16y agoIt's also worth noting that a lot of facebook's initial appeal, especially when compared to Myspace at the time, beyond its aesthetic improvement, was the fact that it seemed to stand for privacy. The status quo, myspace, was a public-only profile. A facebook profile was accessible only to your contacts or to your school. The available options have slowly but continuously drifted away from that simple promise. A lot of the site's initial traction was driven by huge demand for a reasonable set of privacy controls: myspace was useful but creepy. The argument that the web has moved on in the past six years and that the demand for privacy has lessened is perhaps a red herring, though only time, consumer demand, and viable alternatives will tell: there might be more of an opportunity here than people realize. Overall, I think this is a really interesting question that society is confronting and it will be fun to see how it plays out. Side note: I think a lot of the tech press and blogosphere miss a lot of the subtleties here because, well, people like Arrington, Scoble et al. weren't in school at the time, making the cautious decision to open an account. This has been a revolution led by young people, who are often surprisingly concerned about their privacy and don't depend or plan on Internet celebrity for their livelihoods. It feels a bit like eternal September except in reverse: as the demographic ages, the basic tenents erode.
- CGamesPlay 16y agoCan you enumerate on how the privacy settings are dwindling? Which ones? I feel like I've had greater control over my privacy with more recent changes to Facebook.
- argv_empty 16y agoAs an example, "Likes and Interests," "Education and Work," and parts of "Basic Information" used to be text in your profile with a search link. That search would only show people who had chosen (via privacy settings) to display the relevant part of their profile to you. They are now group-like "Connections" to community pages, whose membership is not secret.
- tewks 16y agoThe privacy options have gotten really complicated. Under the original iterations of the model, the user always knew what the deal was. Now, it is impossible to know what exactly what is exactly going on. The original submission exemplifies this. I don't mean to sound critical. It's not easy to innovate while aso supporting the needs of 400m+ users. Obviously. a team of smart people have put a lot of time and effort into this system, but it won't ever be perfect. Again, it's been an exciting area to watch evolve and I suspect this will continue to be the case for quite some time.
- scott_s 16y agoFacebook only has access to what you give it.
- pak 16y agoOr what your friends give it, or your friends' friends, or anybody else that can tag something that relates back to your profile... see the problem?
- jrockway 16y agoThat you are friends with strange people?
- pak 16y agoEven if I take your bait and leap to the conclusion that everybody spends their life pruning their Facebook friend lists, have your friends never said anything embarassing about you? As a prank, in a fight, etc.? Thanks to Facebook, it can be in a thousand people's news feeds in a minute, and with the permanence of computers and the internet, saved forever on a hundred hard drives, some of which belong to people who are definitely not among your friends (that includes Facebook the company itself).
- scott_s 16y agoIn theory, yes, in practice, no. That sort of problem exists without Facebook.
- frederickcook 16y agoI think it's worth pointing out that on Twitter, there is only one privacy setting, when you set up an account, and you have complete access to who sees your tweets. Unless I missed a major news story about this, I don't think Twitter has yet violated anyone's trust there. Facebook, on the other hand, by either incompetence or some skewed sense of openness, at some point has made a choice that it wants to put all your information out there while giving you the illusion that you have some control over it. The point is that privacy isn't impossible. It's simple. You have an element in a database that is flagged as important to someone, so you make sure that before you ever pull that element out and put it on the web, the proper controls are in place. It is just a choice a company makes of how high of a priority to make something, and Facebook has demonstrated that privacy means more to them as a PR issue than a real concern about user data.
- runT1ME 16y agoIts interesting you put things so black and white. I'm not sure its the case. Take me for instance. I value privacy quite a lot, I don't even read my gmail over http, I'm always on the https site. :-) However, given that the internet is populated with Ads, I'm more than happy to give the entire world a list of movies, music, bands, clothing brands, hobbies, etc. that I have so I don't keep seeing irrelevant, annoying ads. I'd be happy if amazon obnoxiously let me know when a new CD from one of the bands I enjoyed came out, or that new movie by my favorite director was released on Blue Ray. What I don't want, is the web knowing that I commented on such and such's wall, or that I'm attending my sister's surprise birthday party. I think a internet with ads that doesn't infringe on privacy is possible.
- philwelch 16y agoI suspect Facebook's mission is to ease people away from their privacy willingly.