Facebook and (the non-salability of) your data
Posted 3/02/2007 07:40:00 AM |
Agarwala's deadpan narration really makes the video, but I'm left conflicted. The Facebook seems to be sending very mixed messages about our private data. As Agarwala rightly points out, the Terms of Service allow Facebook to do whatever they want with your data. And seeing as contextual ads are being served, it seems like Facebook is taking steps to monetize the data.
However, as I was reading about the Facebook developer platform, I came across this interesting segment:
Only your friends and people in your network can see your information, and everything is subject to the privacy settings that you select; the same rules apply to outside applications as well. Outside applications are not allowed to store or collect your data, and we certainly aren't selling your information to ANYONE. That's yoursThis is extremely interesting - Facebook, on a Facebook-owned property, has made a (legally binding?) claim that they are not selling our data. Obviously, this conflicts with the some of the rights granted in the TOS, but that's not a problem. What is the problem is the absolute nature of the claim. If I parse it correctly, it is to state that Facebook is not monetizing our personal data at all. I'll be interested to see if they stand by this claim, though I have to imagine any public copy has been vetted by teams of lawyers at Facebook HQ. Frankly, I'm very surprised by this claim. I'm interested to hear what you may think.
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4 Comments: (Post a Comment)
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At March 03, 2007 10:17 AM,
Karel said...
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The post was written by an engineer on a technical/developer site. Since not signed off my an executive, I doubt it is legally binding.
More over, it speaks only in the present tense. Facebook currently may not be selling the data, but they certainly reserve the future right to do so.
The legal TOS is important, because if Facebook were to be acquired or the current management team replaced, those legally binding terms would be the only restrictions to use on the data. So they have to be unlimiting, to make acquisition attractive.
Karel
author of Inside Facebook
www.fbbook.com -
At March 03, 2007 12:14 PM,
said...
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I understand their are concerns about privacy (OK, that was a euphemism) but one thing in this animation and on many similar video is the conspiracy theory relying on connection with Arpa and In-Q-Tel: for Christ sake, the militaries were involved in the making of the Internet from the very begining: how lame do you have to be to make statements like:
- FaceBook is an Internet website;
- Internet used to be a (D)Arpa project;
- this project was based a military funding;
- Therefore all websites allow secret services with bad intentions and heart-less killing machines disguised as agents with shades must have left backdoors in the protocol to kill little girls and drink the blood of puppie at night if you subscribe to them.
No offense to the Wachowski brothers, but that is Matrix's scenario, and we can all agree that was not the most convincing aspect of the film.
On the actual debate you raise:
does contextual advertizing infringe your privacy? Facebook can say:
- we have reasonnable data on what books on users love (1);
- how many users declare their favorite book is "The Catcher in the Rye" (2): that is not strictly confidential information;
- they can sell to a company the advertizing space on these users pages without saying who these are (3), right?
- giving a way to reach them, without internal Facebook control is more intrusive yet (4);
- selling their coordinates, that is clearly beyond was is reasonnable (5).
Up to (3) sounds reasonnable to me. ToS doesn't, but find me a lawyer that is reasonnable before complaining about absurdly leonine contract. More importantly, find a law that is clear about automated data treatment, statistical secret and actual digital data protection: how safe should encrypted data be? Because, as far as I know, no judge here would ever consider those ToS as appropriate. -
At March 07, 2007 6:51 AM,
Tom Shelley said...
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I wrote a post about just this thing today as I'm grappling with these problems myself (http://fedoralreserve.wordpress.com/2007/03/07/what-should-we-do-with-economist-group-user-data/). I'm working on an innovation project for the Economist and, to my mind, the best way to improve our readers experience is by aggregating their data.
This means we'll be able to recommend other links our readers read, books they like, people you should meet. Economist readers love meeting other readers and we could really create something amazing.
However, at the same time we're quite an old school media company, so the temptation will be to serve not only relevant content, but also relevant advertising.
Is this wrong? I don't know. Any pointers would be much appreciated. -
At May 03, 2007 7:36 PM,
said...
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propaganda!
