or "facebook won't let you liberate your facebook data to alternate providers".
i don't understand why people tolerate facebook. they don't seem deserving of the trust people give them. first opt-in/opt-out privacy issues, now this... plus it doesn't seem like they're really trying to make money yet. i suppose this is what the initial "exclusivity" of the facebook brand got them: loyalty without needing trust.
People tollerate them because they won they social space. The winners always get free passes on things that only matter to a few people. Most people dont think about getting their data out. Where would they put it?
I'm starting to understand why my Linux and Android-using friends abhor my Apple preference. I'm still willing to make excuses for the one I like, however.
Most non-technical average users (read: the majority of their users ) just don't really understand / care about the privacy issues.
They just love the experience they can find at and pretty much only at the facebook site.
The tech press and media make an initial fuss about all of it but by the time they figure out a way to bring it down to a level the masses can understand facebook has put a notification on the top of the News Feed to explain.
I'm not agreeing with the practices merely attempting to explain why in the minds of the lion share of facebook users mind it just does not matter
Users are circumventing Facebook to protect their privacy, using email and self-censoring (this is further along in the presentation). There is also anecdotal evidence presented at the beginning of when they are presented with the not-so obvious consequence of general sharing they are actually quite horrified.
urm, that slidedeck is from google employee, so fairly obviously bias plus the "proof" it provides is one slide with an anecdotal quote.
I cant provide any stronger proof aside from their 500+ million users, but anecdotally, outside this hacker news / techcrunch esque commmunity, nobody cares about the facebook privacy issues. At the very least its in question enough to not be "completely and utterly wrong"
A lot of teens/young adults self censor on Facebook, not because of privacy issues with relation to the rest of the world, but because of privacy issues concerning their parents/relatives. 'Oh shit my mom is on Facebook', was an SNL sketch a few months ago. It is definitely an issue that people think about.
The problem is that 'us nerds' try to explain it based on technical merits rather than giving practical examples in which privacy concerns are at issue. (I don't want everything that is said to my best friend Billy to go to my mom; I sometimes use language that my grandma would find inappropriate; I don't want my girlfriends to find out about each other, etc.)
I've found the complete opposite. that most of my non-technical friends care about facebook privacy a lot, many of them delete their accounts as soon as they feel like people are knowing too much about them. As a technical-user, I don't care much about the privacy issues, mostly because I just gave up and realize that privacy really doesn't exist on Facebook.
This is a good point. A search engine like duckduckgo can choose to make much less by not tracking so much user data...and its still "enough". There are other vectors to bootstrap a friends/family sharing system that values privacy. Such a system can make a lot less than FB and still be "enough".
That would depend on how the costs of running servers scale with the number of users. If they scale faster, duck duck go would need to increase its income somehow.
Facebook has undeniably value. Connecting with other people is a pretty universal trait so it's no wonder Facebook has those half a billion people. That's what I use it for, too.
However, unlike some of those half a billion people, I do care about protecting my private life somewhat. Yet I'm willing to give up something for the value I find in the connectivity that Facebook provides. Depending on what personal information is at the stake, on how Facebook acts, and on your privacy expectations that something clearly varies.
For me, keeping any of Facebook's potential negative impacts to the minimum comes down to sanitizing the privacy settings and rechecking them every other month or so (or following any of the facebook privacy news articles) for new changes.
i don't understand why people tolerate facebook. they don't seem deserving of the trust people give them. first opt-in/opt-out privacy issues, now this... plus it doesn't seem like they're really trying to make money yet. i suppose this is what the initial "exclusivity" of the facebook brand got them: loyalty without needing trust.