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Yearly Archives: 2010
Facebook faces a Diaspora
Ever since Facebook deployed their ‘instant personalisation’ tools (ie putting a ‘Like’ button on pretty much everything online), the backlash against the resulting privacy losses has been loud and clear; Facebook look to be going into PR damage control, as Read Write Web notes, they’re circling the wagons. Despite providing Elliot Schrage, vice president for public policy at Facebook, a platform to directly engage with public concerns about Facebook earlier this week, the New York Times has seemingly turned on the social networking goliath today. First off the ranks, their article ‘Price of Facebook Privacy? Start Clicking’ does a really good job at showing the huge problems with Facebook’s privacy settings, from the privacy policies massive (and growing) length, to a brilliant (and dumbfounding) infographic which illustrates the more than 170 privacy options users need to navigate and understand to have any ownership of your privacy on Facebook.
At the same time, the New York Times are asking ‘Is There Life After Facebook?’, in which they talk about the problems of social media evangelists who feel Facebook has crossed a line, and want to delete their own profiles. Yet the strongest critique of Facebook’s recent changes comes from the showcase ‘Four Nerds and a Cry to Arms Against Facebook’ which introduces the founders of Diaspora, a yet-to-be-released social network which will attempt to replicate the social elements of Facebook while providing clear privacy controls using an open-source framework. While it’s far too early to judge whether Diaspora will be successful, the fact that they’ve already raised more than $US60,000 via Kickstarter (with pledges from more than 1700 people!) shows that a lot of people are looking for a change.
At first glance, Diaspora’s aims might seem a little utopian (and thus technically quite hard to achieve):
Diaspora aims to be a distributed network, where totally separate computers connect to each other directly, will let us connect without surrendering our privacy. We call these computers ‘seeds’. A seed is owned by you, hosted by you, or on a rented server. Once it has been set up, the seed will aggregate all of your information: your facebook profile, tweets, anything. We are designing an easily extendable plugin framework for Diaspora, so that whenever newfangled content gets invented, it will be automagically integrated into every seed.
Now that you have your information in your seed, it will connect to every service you used to have for you. For example, your seed will keep pulling tweets and you will still be able to see your Facebook newsfeed. In fact, Diaspora will make those services better! Upload an image to Flickr and your seed can automatically generate a tweet from the caption and link. Social networking will just get better when you have control over your data.
A seed will not just be all your existing networks put together, though. Decentralizing lets us reconstruct our “social graphs” so that they belong to us. Our real social lives do not have central managers, and our virtual lives do not need them. Friend another seed and the two of you can synchronize over a direct and secure connection instead of through a superfluous hub. Encryption (privacy nerds: we’re using GPG) will ensure that no matter what kind of content is being transferred, you can share privately. Eventually, today’s hubs could be almost entirely replaced by a decentralized network of truly personal websites.
If Diaspora tells us anything, it’s that Facebook’s dominance is under threat, and the next Mark Zuckerberg (or Zuckerbergs in Diaspora’s case) might start with firmer principles in place. Privacy is one of the great bugbears of social media, we want to share, but we want at least a modicum of control over that. Facebook might roll back some of its worst ‘personalisation’ changes of recent weeks, but even then, many people have lost the will to trust Facebook; that loss might be their most expensive mistake ever.
Digital Culture Links: May 12th 2010
Links for May 10th 2010 through May 12th 2010:
- Show us the money! Oz Budget under CC [Creative Commons Australia] – Perhaps the only outstanding thing about the Australian budget was the licensing of it (congrats to CC Australia!): “In the debate over the merits of last night’s conservative budget, there’s one thing we’d argue Swan did get right – the licensing. The entire budget has been released under a Creative Commons Attribution licence. This means the material it contains – the deficit strategy, the fiscal aggregates, the government’s responses to the economic crisis – is all available for free reuse, by anyone, for any purpose, as long as the source is attributed. A single document, even one that’s 350 pages long, may not seem like that big a deal compared to some of the other open government initiatives over the last few years – like the release of the Australian Bureau of Statistic’s entire store of census data under CC. But as a public endorsement of CC as the licence of choice for the Australian Federal Government, it’s huge.”
- Roulette Russian: The teen-ager behind Chatroulette [The New Yorker] – A really odd feature from Julia Ioffe which is based on interviews with Andrey Ternovskiy, the Russian teenager who invented Chatroulette. Ioffe’s story is more about Ternovskiy leaving Russia for the US than anything else and it paints Chatroulette as a website built with equal parts of skill and naivete. It ends of a rather hollow note, implying that relationships built online are substantially less than ‘real’.
- Confusing *a* public with *the* public « BuzzMachine – Jeff Jarvis thinks ‘a public’ is a small group, while ‘the public’ is everyone; he think Facebook needs to think this, too: “I think Facebook’s problem lately with its disliked like button (and Google’s problem with the start of Buzz) is that they confuse the notion of the public sphere—that is, all of us—with the idea of making a public—that is, the small societies we create on Facebook or join on Twitter. Private v. public is not a binary decision; there is a vast middle inbetween that is about the control of our own publics. Allow me to explain…. […] That is, when I blog something, I am publishing it to the world for anyone and everyone to see: the more the better, is the assumption. But when I put something on Facebook my assumption had been that I was sharing it just with the public I created and control there. That public is private.”
- Obama stresses education over iPod, Xbox [Reuters] – “President Barack Obama told college graduates on Sunday the era of the iPod and the Xbox has not always been good for the cause of a strong education. Obama said today’s college graduates are coming of age at a time of great difficulty for the United States. They face a tough economy for jobs, two wars and a 24/7 media environment not always dedicated to the truth, he said. Added to the mix are the distractions offered by popular electronic devices that entertain millions of Americans. “With iPods and iPads; Xboxes and PlayStations — none of which I know how to work — information becomes a distraction, a diversion, a form of entertainment, rather than a tool of empowerment, rather than the means of emancipation,” Obama said.”
On Deveny, Devine and Twitter … in public!
By now everyone in Australia knows who Catherine Deveny is thanks to some particularly tasteless and provocative tweets during the Logies ceremony which proved the straw that broke the camels back; she was ‘dropped as a columnist for The Age after a storm of controversy’ with Editor-In-Chief, Paul Ramadge declaring that ‘the views she has expressed recently on Twitter are not in keeping with the standards we set at The Age’. Deveny defended her tweets claiming that Twitter is about “passing notes in class, but suddenly these notes are being projected into the sky and taken out of context” but this defense seems naive at best so it was hardly a surprise they The Age’s technology editor Gordon Farrer wrote a piece explaining just how public (and useful) Twitter is.
In a New Matilda piece, Jason Wilson points out that there is a lot more to the story and while many people won’t miss Deveny’s columns, the way in which she was dismissed has left a bad taste in many mouths:
Although her MO consists of antagonising people, there was something that reeked of mob justice in the way she was dismissed. Social media can be about sharing, conversation, and positive forms of activism — but they can also be a venue for a kind of outrage porn. This can be quickly satiated without effecting any lasting change, and any one of us might stir it up with an ill-advised tweet or two. There but for the Grace of God, etc.
Last week I had a chance to share some of my views on RTRFM as well, which you can listen to online here.
[audio:http://www.tamaleaver.net/cv/deveny.mp3]In this maelstrom, conservative columnist Miranda Devine wrote a rambling column which started like a sympathy-piece for Deveny, but ended with a wrap on the knuckles:
In a chaotic world of aggregators, of Google and Twitter and specialist web feeds, a newspaper is a "credible one-stop shop" of local news where all the hard choices have been made for the reader. Which is why not trashing the brand is more important than ever. Sorry, Catherine.
Devine’s position was unsurprising, but she clearly didn’t understand her own point when just a few days later she responded to criticism on Twitter by telling her critic that “you’ve had enough of rogering gerbils I see”. Devine may have realised she’d crossed a line, and deleted her tweet, only to be reminded that there is no delete button on the internet as screenshots of the exchange were rapidly circulated, but there appear to have been no reprimands for Devine (although she has spring cleaned and deleted a few more tweets, I think).
Last night on the ABC’s Q&A the panel touched on Deveny’s case and concluded, in a very round-about way, we need to remember that (unless you’ve got a private account) tweets are always public; in the first instance you might be talking with a smaller group, but once something is public, your readership is uncertain but is potentially very wide indeed. Jonathan Holmes probably made this point most clearly last week, noting of Deveny:
She also claimed she was taken out of context. I’m not the first to remark that Twitter has no context. Each tweet must stand alone, 140 characters max. Hard to convey irony, or amusement, or hate. Hard to convey that when you say you hope Bindi gets laid, you’re using satire "to expose celebrity raunch culture and the sexual objectification of women". Twitter is a treacherous medium. So fast, so simple, so easy to get wrong.
Thanks the ABC, Deveny has now provided the context she had in mind, and despite something of an explanation, and sort of a bit of an apology, she stands by what she wrote which, ultimately, will probably increase her stock as a comedian celebrity provocateur. For everyone else, we do need to remember that most social media is public (or can easily be copied and become public), whilst still making the most of the many uses of social media platforms like Twitter, and not just following Helen Razer and becoming a Twitter Quitter. Twitter is a powerful tool, but you should, of course, think before you tweet.
Digital Culture Links: May 10th 2010
Links for May 7th 2010 through May 10th 2010:
- An Early Look At Twitter Annotations Or, “Twannotations” [TechCrunch] – Twitter are adding annotations, or twannotataions, in the near future; it’ll let specific ‘things’ be identified. It’s a bit like turning Twitter into a semantic communication tool. Richard Giles asks if this will make Twitter (a privately owned) internet protocol be default, but either way annotations should make Twitter even more of a cultural barometer.
- The Tell-All Generation Learns When Not To, at Least Online [NYTimes.com] – Privacy concerns online cross all generational barrier, despite the myth of the millennial mindset: “The conventional wisdom suggests that everyone under 30 is comfortable revealing every facet of their lives online, from their favorite pizza to most frequent sexual partners. But many members of the tell-all generation are rethinking what it means to live out loud. While participation in social networks is still strong, a survey released last month by the University of California, Berkeley, found that more than half the young adults questioned had become more concerned about privacy than they were five years ago — mirroring the number of people their parent’s age or older with that worry. They are more diligent than older adults, however, in trying to protect themselves.”
- Facebook’s Gone Rogue; It’s Time for an Open Alternative [Wired.com] – Ryan Singel takes Facebook to task for the continual failings in respecting user privacy both in terms of their architecture (so many things simply can’t be turned off now) and their policies (basically, screwing with privacy one step at a time, while using a raft of lawyers to ensure it’s not illegal … but maybe unethical). Singel argues that everything Facebook currently provides could be achieved by a series of open tools and protocols which provide real and clear choices about what we do and don’t share with the world. Singel argues we need to make these choices now because Facebook, for many, has almost become our online identity.
- Zuckerberg’s Law of Information Sharing [NYTimes.com] – From November 6, 2008: “On stage at the Web 2.0 Summit on Thursday, Mark Zuckerberg, the chief executive of Facebook, was cheerfully unruffled. Mr. Zuckerberg pinned his optimism on a change in behavior among Internet users: that they are ever more willing to tell others what they are doing, who their friends are, and even what they look like as they crawl home from the fraternity party. “I would expect that next year, people will share twice as much information as they share this year, and next year, they will be sharing twice as much as they did the year before,” he said. “That means that people are using Facebook, and the applications and the ecosystem, more and more.” Call it Zuckerberg’s Law.” The great thing about controlling the privacy settings for more than 400 million people, is it’s pretty easy to change things so more and more and their information is shared … even if many users don’t understand how and don’t think this is what they signed up for!
- The Evolution of Privacy on Facebook [mattmckeon.com] – A really useful inforgraphic by Matt McKeon which demonstrates five stages of Facebook’s default settings and how much information is public by default at each stage (short version: 2005 – not much; 2010 – almost everything!)
- Most pirates say they’d pay for legal downloads [News.com.au] – Peer-topeer sharers want legal options in Australia: “Most people who illegally download movies, music and TV shows would pay for them if there was a cheap and legal service as convenient as file-sharing tools like BitTorrent. That’s the finding of the most comprehensive look yet at people who illegally download TV shows, movies and music in Australia, conducted by news.com.au and market research firm CoreData. The survey canvassed the attitudes of more than 7000 people who admitted to streaming or downloading media from illegitimate sources in the past 12 months. It found accessibility was as much or more of a motivator than money for those who illegally download media using services like BitTorrent. More respondents said they turned to illegal downloads because they were convenient than because they were free … [More results here.]
- What Happens When You Deactivate Your Facebook Account [Read Write Web] – Facebook is a big part of millions and millions of peoples’ lives, but what happens when you pull the plug? Last night I met a man who walked to the edge of the cliff and nearly deactivated his Facebook account. He took a screenshot of what he saw after clicking the “deactivate my account” link on his account page – and it is pretty far-out. That man considered quitting Facebook because it was having an adverse emotional impact on him and I’ll spare him and his contacts from posting the screenshot he shared with me. I have posted below though a shot of the screen I saw when I clicked that button myself. Check it out. I bet you haven’t seen this screen before, have you? […] Can you believe that? How incredibly manipulative! And what claims to make. Facebook has undoubtedly made it easier to keep in touch with people than almost any other technology on the planet, but to say that leaving Facebook means your friends “will no longer be able to keep in touch with you” is just wrong.”
May 21st is Leave Facebook Day!
After all of the recent privacy debacles, a growing band of Facebook users have had enough and are banding together to say goodbye to the social networking behemoth once and for all; here are the details …
Leave Facebook Day
I’ve had it up to here with Facebook, and their constant distancing from issues of privacy and the concerns of their users. The benefits of being able to connect and get information about my social network no longer outweigh the costs of FB using and abusing my social graph.
So I’ve decided to leave Facebook. It’s not going to be easy. Facebook make sure that deleting your account is somewhat akin to leaving a cult with lots of ‘but we’ll miss you and we love you and come back to us’ style of wailing and gnashing of teeth.
But I’m committed. I’m climbing the wall around the Facebook compound and making a break for freedom. Start humming “The Great Escape” theme, guys, because I want you to come with me
I want to declare May 21st Leave Facebook Day. On that day, let’s all leave Facebook. Let’s hit that radio button that says “I’m leaving because of privacy issues” and let Facebook know that we won’t be folded, spindled or mutilated, that we are human beings, not social data to be sold. Let’s all climb the wall together.
Tell your friends. Use the #LeaveFBday hash tag on twitter. Blog about it. Heck, update your Facebook status.
Let’s just get out while we still can.
UPDATE #1: twitter user @thesixthbaron notes that, even after requesting a complete account deletion, Facebook still holds your data ‘in case of reactivation.’
Digital Culture Links: May 6th 2010
Links for May 5th 2010 through May 6th 2010:
- Glitch Brings New Worries About Facebook’s Privacy [NYTimes.com] – Privacy concerns = declining trust! “For many users of Facebook, the world’s largest social network, it was just the latest in a string of frustrations. On Wednesday, users discovered a glitch that gave them access to supposedly private information in the accounts of their Facebook friends, like chat conversations. Not long before, Facebook had introduced changes that essentially forced users to choose between making information about their interests available to anyone or removing it altogether. Although Facebook quickly moved to close the security hole on Wednesday, the breach heightened a feeling among many users that it was becoming hard to trust the service to protect their personal information.”
- Facebook Burning Through Its Most Valuable Asset [The NewsCloud Blog] – Why trust still matters: “Venture investors often focus on the burn rate of a startup to determine how long a company can operate before it becomes profitable. After last week, investors in Facebook should be asking how long the company can continue its phenomenal growth as it quickly burns through the trust of users that expected the company to protect their privacy. […] Now, I’ve even more amazed that after Google’s Buzz debacle, Facebook has drawn a line in the sand against common sense and the basic privacy expectations of its growing user base with its new social graph. Just as Microsoft employees, incredibly, seemed to think they could surreptitiously market exploitative sexting ads to teens by using a male rather than a female, Facebook thinks that it can sustain its growth while essentially pimping the private lives of its users to the highest bidder. There seems to be no adult supervision at either company.”
- Catherine Deveny Fired From The Age [The Age] – Yes, controversial/provocative comedian Catherine Deveny has been fired from The Age for tweets made during the Logies, including the now infamous “I do so hope Bindi Irwin gets laid”. Her humour is generally in poor taste, but is it worth sacking someone for, especially in their own time? Deveny certainly seems well within her rights to ask if there is actually a policy about social media at The Age. There probably should be. That aside, this little controversy has probably given Deveny – and the Logies – more free press than they’ve enjoyed in years. I’d suggest this “sacking” makes her more commercially viable as a personality, not less employable. I guess we’ll see.
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