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Facebook Slaps Google: “Openness Doesn’t Mean Being Open When It’s Convenient”
- bradhe 16y agoYou mean Facebook, the company that has had a pretty rough PR year thanks to its deceptive privacy policies and practices?
- btilly 16y agoHey, a failure to respect privacy is just direct evidence of openness, right? (Disclaimer. I may be biased by working for Google. But I'm also not opposed to switching from a BSD to GPL strategy to encourage freedom.)
- kmavm 16y agoLaugh while you can. During the Buzz launch, I recall Google found it just as hard to negotiate the intrinsically tricky balance between privacy and openness. There is a real trade-off between the two in products that allow you to share information with groups larger than one. Good luck with your new social product.
- btilly 16y agoI'm fully aware of this. However I happen to personally believe that Google's missteps have been far less than Facebook's - and less intentional. I'm sure that both companies will continue to fail to find the perfect balance. I'm strongly inclined to believe that Google will fail less. (However people will continue to hold us to a higher standard.)
- kmavm 16y ago> less intentional. I'd refer you to Hanlon's Razor. You might also want to introspect as to why the singular social privacy fiasco whose decision-making you've seen internally strikes you as less evil than the privacy fiascos you've witnessed as an outsider. Also, life is long, and the valley is small. We may work together someday. Let's try to presume good faith when possible, eh?
- btilly 16y agoOn intentionality, I find myself in agreement with a lot of what http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/facebooks_zuckerberg_says_the_age_of_privacy_is_ov.php http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/facebooks_zuckerberg_sa... has to say. Facebook acquired a lot of data when everything was promised to be private, then changed the rules on people. Repeatedly. And Zuckerberg has been privately cavalier about his responsibility to respect privacy from the start, as is evidenced by http://www.businessinsider.com/well-these-new-zuckerberg-ims-wont-help-facebooks-privacy-problems-2010-5 http://www.businessinsider.com/well-these-new-zuckerberg-ims.... This does not mean to say that most, or even very many, people working at Facebook are as morally challenged as Zuckerberg seems to me to be. But the fact that I think that some of Facebook's controversial decisions come from Zuckerberg, and that I don't think Zuckerberg is acting in good faith, is why I view various incidents involving Facebook as being more evil. As for the valley being small, it is but I don't live there. And it seems unlikely that I will ever live there. Furthermore my feelings about any particular company don't generally extend to the rank and file working there. Similarly I don't let my hatred of Microsoft's policies get in the way of my having friendships with people who work at, or used to work at, Microsoft.
- kmavm 16y agoSorry for any perceived "valley-centrism"; feel free to substitute "small industry" for "small valley." What does Zuck's level of personal awesome have to do with anything? This strikes me as a major confusion about the business/consumer relationship. I know Zuck, and I happen to think he's a fine guy, but you don't, and you shouldn't have to. I don't trust Google because Eric Schmidt is spiritually advanced, or because an engineer who now works at Facebook coined a tongue-in-cheek "Don't be evil" motto 12 years and 25,000 employees ago; I trust it because its search business' incentives are aligned with mine as a searcher. So, what are Facebook's incentives? Facebook wants you to use its service to communicate with friends, so that it can show you targeted display ads. In the long run, using the service requires you to feel comfortable with who has access to your data, so Facebook's business has to get privacy and openness approximately right. Like everything about a customer-facing service, that turns out to be harder than it looks, at least while providing a stream of new features, but get it right we must for the business' health. But you're about to find out all about that...
- pmb 16y agoOpenness also doesn't mean being a sucker. Share and share-alike provides an optimal solution to the iterated prisoner's dilemma of openness.
- plemer 16y agoI cannot think of a less appropriate organization to declare this exact criticism.
- megaman821 16y agoI don't get why people have such a problem with this. If Hitler says genocide is wrong, does the fact that it came from Hitler make it any less true. The arguments put forth either stand on their own or they don't. The fact that they came from a Facebook engineer is irrelevant.
- lukeschlather 16y agoGoogle is not on trial here. As Facebook showed, my data in Google is totally available to me should I need it. He's explicitly accusing Google of committing a crime they didn't commit, even as he himself is guilty of it.
- axavier 16y agoGoogle did break the Orkut data exporter, then completely removed it when people were trying to switch out of Orkut. I'm not sure how that's accusing them of committing a crime they didn't commit - it's a fact.
- rapind 16y agoIn your analogy though does he say it with a (not so) hidden agenda?
- indigoviolet 16y agoIt's interesting how noone wants to actually respond to the arguments that Mike Vernal is making, instead resorting to the equivalent of "Facebook is evil, how dare they say they aren't!".
- guelo 16y agoIf I happend to email you once 2 years ago did I consent to be linked to you when you join Facebook?
- kmavm 16y agoWould anybody like to actually read the words, understand them, and engage with the argument they contain, rather than snark about how FB == teh hatez? The meat of it is: "Each person owns her friends list, but not her friends’ information. A person has no more right to mass export all of her friends’ private email addresses than she does to mass export all of her friends’ private photo albums. Email is different from social networking because in an email application, each person maintains and owns their own address book, whereas in a social network your friends maintain their information and you just maintain a list of friends. Because of this, we think it makes sense for email applications to export email addresses and for social networks to export friend lists. Facebook Platform and the Graph API enable everyone to bring their own information to millions of sites and applications, including even Google’s YouTube."
- krschultz 16y agoHe is talking out of both sides of his mouth though. If Facebook exports a list of friends, what do you get? A list of names with no links? That isn't really useful. You either need email addresses or Facebook profile URLs to actually make a graph. What if your list is Billy Bob, Joe Smith, John Doe, and Mike Collins. How many of those are there are facebook? Dozens? Hundreds? It is meaningless. If Facebook exports a list of all of the friends' Facebook profile URLs, that is a step in the right direction.
- kmavm 16y agoThe graph API provides exactly what you are asking for. It doesn't provide friends' names, but FBIDs. http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=<id> http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=<id> is the user's profile, and http://graph.facebook.com/<id> http://graph.facebook.com/<id> is the public JSON for that ID. If you have an access token (on behalf of a logged in user), the graph API will also let you see other information for the user that you are entitled to see. Have you ever used a Facebook Connect site, like Google's YouTube? Have you noticed you can find your friends on the site? This works because the service gets FBIDs of both logged in users and friends.
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- dools 16y agoCan a comment on the tech crunch blog by one of the Facebook engineers be taken as an official Facebook position?
- fleitz 16y agoWho cares. Seriously, this stuff is very much inside baseball which is why Facebook doesn't even care to comment. Changing the icon on the Like button will generate far more negative PR than this ever will, and spawn 10,000 "OMG, I hate the new like button" groups.
- its_raining 16y agoWell, now I keep bouncing between Facebook and Google regarding who's "right".
- mikeryan 16y agoIts been just about a year since I joined Facebook and started using it a lot. I have to say I'm kind of over it. I'm not closing my account or anything. I just think my usage is going to drop a bit precipitously. I don't really trust Facebook anymore. I don't think they're evil, I just think at some point they're going to have to make some tough choices to live up to their valuation and the only real value they have (outside of ad eyeballs) is their user and graph information. Its going to end up in 3rd parties hands and I'm not very comfortable with that. Anyway, not sure thats on point but it was something I've kind of been thinking about the last few days and this just drove a few points home.
- araneae 16y agoI've just noticed that Facebook suddenly looks shitty in Chrome (padding on the left up and went). Coincidence?
- naner 16y agoA person has no more right to mass export all of her friends’ private email addresses than she does to mass export all of her friends’ private photo albums. Email is different from social networking because in an email application, each person maintains and owns their own address book, whereas in a social network your friends maintain their information and you just maintain a list of friends. Not really, exporting your address book is the exact same thing as exporting a list of your friends' email addresses. He had good points against Google, though.
- WesleyJohnson 16y agoI think the difference is that if you email someone, most everyone understands that you're giving the user your email address and permission to email you back unless you use a disposable email address. Contrast that "knowledge" with facebook email addresses. How many people are really aware of whether or not their email on facebook is public, friend of friend, friend, etc? I suppose that's a separate usability and privacy concern than what we're discussing, but exporting data of friends just seems different to me than exporting contacts from Google. Janet may have exposed her email address and phone number to me on facebook by "friending" me, but she's really just an acquaintance I met through a friend and emailing or calling her is more intimate than either of us want. Conversely, Judy and I met through a work colleague and she wants to do lunch and talk about a startup so she asked for my email address. I now feel like I have permission to email her as well. My argument doesn't sound convincing, even to myself, but I still feel like the two forms of interaction and communication come with different inherent understandings. I have ~130 friends on facebook all of whom I've met in person save a single contact. The one I haven't met I would and have emailed, but out of the others I'd say 20% are people that would be welcome to receiving an email from me and vice versa. Emailing the other 80% would feel like an encroachment on my part. That said, why would I never need to mass download or import facebook contact details? I've already added the people I am inclined to email into my Google contacts, because there has been a mutual and deliberate decision to exchange contact information. Not sure where I'm going with this, thinking out loud perhaps. ;) Edit: Typos...
- naner 16y ago
- petercooper 16y agoThe most important principle for Facebook is that every person owns and controls her information. Sounds very noble but I suspect this is far from Facebook's "most important principle."
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- m3mb3r 16y agoMan, I can't believe we have these huge discussions about some petty fights. We know both parties are talking crap to uphold their selfish positions, don't we?
- neilk 16y agoSo their theory here is that when I add a friend on Facebook, I am really saying this: "I share some of my contact info with you, but only as long as we both use Facebook?" That's a convenient notion if you happen to work for Big #3b5998. But I think almost anyone would agree that it's really two people making a connection, and Facebook is just the middleman.
- yariv 16y agoThe theory is that by accepting someone's friend request you're not automatically granting them the ability to export your email address to any application that asks for it. If it were possible there's a good chance your inbox would quickly be filled with spam from apps your friends use. I know of no social network, including Google's own Orkut, Twitter, and Myspace, which allows this kind of mass exportation of friend emails via its API.
- nostromo 16y ago> If it were possible there's a good chance your inbox would quickly be filled with spam from apps your friends use. Apps like, um, FaceBook?
- gilted 16y agoMore like Zynga apps. Could you imagine if Farmville could easily get a hold of the emails of all of your friends? God help us.
- nostromo 16y agoMy only point is that the scenario yariv frets about is exactly what FaceBook did to grow. Before I joined FaceBook I would get regular emails about all of my friends on FB that had uploaded my contact info via GMail.
- joe_the_user 16y agoLike Nostromo said... Plus it's pretty clear Facebook itself needs to make a distinction between something like a "export application" (that does generate nothing-like-spam) and something like Farmville (which is only generates something-like-spam). While this lack of distinction is a serious problem for Facebook ... it hardly qualifies as a good argument for Facebook being able to export from everyone else but not allowing exports to anyone.
- gaiusparx 16y agoTo make peace, maybe Google should buy Facebook. Or is it the other way round?
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- endergen 16y agoThey made up their contorted Social Expectation. Most of us have never really thought of what we expect our friends to be able to do with our information. I think we all assume that we trust our friends to occasionally share too much but you have to trust them to some point to just use their best judgement, even now they can go share your email anyway. One way network grabs are cheap tactics. A user should be able to leave a network with the data that's been entrusted in them, just like with Address books, Calendars, or other trustingly shared data. This is all about crippling the convenience of people leaving their network for competitors. You can already share with out permission, just not easily. This isn't about protecting our privacy, it's just about slowing down our power to go elsewhere at will.
- anigbrowl 16y agoIf it's on the internet it's public domain, apparently.
- temp0 16y agoThe pimps are fighting over the data again. I wonder which one will win?
- lkozma 16y agoI wonder if it is common strategy to have an export feature but willingly leave it broken. Some users will think they made a mistake and stay with the service out of inertia (?). I have seen broken exports in suspiciously many online services, most recently in everyone's favorite commenting engine. After filing a bug report, they quickly sent me my data and told me they are working on the issue. I want to believe !