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Time to worry about Facebook's data?
Farhad Manjoo
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TEXT OF COMMENTARY
Kai Ryssdal: I don't know if you saw "Saturday Night Live" this weekend, but Betty White gave Facebook a big shout out for helping her get the hosting gig. Something like a half-a-million people on the social-networking site clicked on the "like" button on her fan page.
You can use button, "like," to flag all kinds of preferences that will then be shared with your friends and possibly the whole Internet. Your favorite music, what political or social causes you follow -- pretty much anything.
Commentator Farhad Manjoo explains the upsides and the down.
Farhad Manjoo: Every one of those "likes" -- a billion statements of preference every day, 365 billion every year, at least -- will get filed back at Facebook HQ. It is difficult to overstate the value, to Facebook, of all this activity. Remember that the social network already has the world's largest database of connections between people.
Now, very soon, it will also have the largest database connecting people to the things we enjoy, whether those things are news stories, restaurants, songs, books, movies, jeans, cosmetics, or anything else. No other company will have anything like Facebook's towering database of human intentions and desires -- not even Google.
Should we be worried about all this? Yes and no.
I suspect that Facebook, like Google, will use its stash of data in ways that are wonderful and in ways that are creepy. This is the double-edged sword of a digital life. Big companies are tracking you all the time, and they're doing a lot of things you don't like with that information -- including serving you ads.
But all the data is also extremely useful, too. Google and Amazon, for instance, are powerful precisely because they know so much about you. It's only by keeping mountains of data that Google can predict when flu season will start, or describe the traffic conditions on your morning commute. We're bound to see similar benefits from all of Facebook's personalized data.
Think of how much more useful you'd find a shopping site if it made consistently good recommendations based on your known likes and dislikes. Or consider how much safer you'd feel signing up to a new tax-preparation company if you saw that your friends had "liked" it. Thanks to Facebook's data, we can expect better movie-recommendation apps, better dating sites, better online games, and probably a lot more.
From now on, none of us will surf alone; people you trust can help you organize and vet every corner of the Web. And Facebook will be at the center of it all.
RYSSDAL: Farhad Manjoo covers technology for Slate.
RE: Steve Norton's quoted text. It is a national emergency when Facebook changes not only its privacy policy but also allows access to your status updates and other information to outside mediums as well as to the greater Facebook population at large when a significant percentage of Facebook users are minors. There is absolutely no oversight. This is a troubling case of disregard as well as irresponsible, calloused, and a very risky position for a corporation.
From a recent WebMemo from the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation:
So the next time Facebook changes its privacy policy, let’s not act like this is a national emergency. Companies do things that the some members of the public do not like all the time. When Coca-Cola introduced New Coke, we did not need the U.S. Senate to step in to right this wrong, and neither do consumers need government to police every feature or policy tweak that websites make.
I'm perplexed by the idea that there will be value in having a web site catalog my "known likes and dislikes," that this will be somehow "better" than making the effort to search for myself. This would cause me to lose the possibility of randomness, of discovering perhaps that my taste had changed or that a different incarnation of something I "disliked" before is something that,in fact, I like. I profoundly *dislike* having Amazon and all the others make recommendations to me based on an algorithm; leave me to my book-review skimming, headline scanning, eavesdropping ways to discover something I want to try!
Hi Kai!
Although I use a library oriented 'social networking' site (librarything.com), I do not use Facebook or the search engine 'Google' (or Twitter) for precisely the reasons given in your report. I have always considered anything entered online to be potentially, if not actually, to be public knowledge: privacy statements be damned,they change. I also don't do financial stuff over the internet for obvious reasons. It is not that I am a Luddite, though, as the internet is a wonderful research and communications tool. I just am cautious about it. Oh yeah, I also don't read the internet ads or 'spam'.
Best,
Chuck
This poem has been a favorite among friends, even those who use Facebook:
You will not find me on Facebook
patrolling my web like a queen spider,
nor are my sheepdog instincts so ingrained
that I feel compelled to patrol the perimeters
of my domain.
You, my reader, separated from me
by no more than seven degrees,
surely, you do not wish me to ask you
to be my friend?
- Amy Young (Poet Laureate of Alexandria, VA)
