An open letter to Mark Zuckerberg
Dear Mark,
First, congrats on building Facebook into the world’s largest social network. You now have about as many users as the US has residents and China has people on the internet. That makes Facebook a very important platform and you a very influential decision-maker on how this new Conversational Age will unfold in the coming years.
I’m writing you now because of your recent remarks during a recent eight-minute interview where you said that you try to maintain "a beginner’s view" of Facebook and make decisions as if you were starting your company today. In that light you decided to open all Facebook user information in the interest of transparency and because you believes your 350 million users were now comfortable with it.
Mark, I have to say, I think you are wrong in so many ways.
We may be in transparent times. If we are I applaud a new age of transparency. But there is a big difference between transparency and privacy. Let me illustrate:
I may elect to blog about taking a work day off and using the time to take a romantic walk on the beach with my wife. I may post a picture of her and my dog on that beach. But their are elements that I keep private. Perhaps we share an intimate moment in the sand dunes. I elect not to tell you about that part.
So there are a few pieces to this. First, I disclosed personal stuff including some photos of loved ones and a confession that I was playing when I should have been working. I also elected to hold back certain parts of the day because they were private.
Transparency is important in business as well. Businesses, using venues such as Facebook are learning that it is safe and wise to be far more transparent today than they were at the beginning of the last decade. But that safety comes from the assurance that they can keep certain matters private and that they get to decide what information they should hold back.
Mark, I have no problem really with the data you just released to the world about me. I’m a pretty transparent person and all the stuff you released is pretty public already. But Mark, I have a huge problem with you deciding to release that stuff about me. I would greatly prefer to have been asked. I’m betting a good percentage of your other 349,999,999 users do as well.
You see, we agreed to other rules. We did not know that you would start every day as if Facebook were brand new and could then change the rules on us and many of us just don’t like it.
To be honest Mark, you are building up a compelling case that there is a command-and-control aspect to your customer approach that a few generals might envy. A couple of years back, you decided to use advertising to monetize Facebook without asking customers.
Some people shrieked and you shrugged implying that they should get a clue. More recently, you unilaterally changed your Terms of Use with 350 million people, declaring that you suddenly owned user-generated content and you could reuse it as you saw fit.
In response, your users started an "I hate Facebook" campaign, using Facebook itself as the group’s epicenter. I thought you were wise to have backed off. I had hoped that you would have learned a lesson. Apparently this was not the case.
Mark, as I stated Facebook is a force to be reckoned with. You can probably get away with this. But please think about the precedent you are setting. If you ca share my user name and email account, why can’t the next guy unilaterally share my phone number, and street address. How about pictures of my grandchildren along with the schools they attend and the routes they walk to get there?
Then there a great question about what banks, credit cards and governments might do down the line.
The term "slippery slope" is little bit overworked, but Mark, honestly, I feel you have just put 350 million of us at the top of a mountain on a toboggan that you remotely control and have gien us a swift push down a steep trajectory.
Please reconsider.
Tags: Zuckerberg, Facebook, Privacy. Terms of Use. "I hate Facebook"e
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{ 2 comments }
Stew,
Thanks for a very thoughtful respnse. MY answer to your question is, yes, I prefer Google's approach to user privacy to Facebook's. I respect the company's decision-makers fr taking that course as well as the one they have taken in China.
Hi Shel
I'm just a one-person, pretty much unknown FB user. Thanks for this article stating your strongly held views on the ever-evolving Facebook platform and in which you targeted its CEO for his so-called military style ruthless disregard for his customers.
I'd like to suggest that perhaps his main "crime", apart from still having a company that's nimble and willing to make hard decisions, is in being honest with how they go about changing things – and if you had read on their blog about any of these changes which were flagged months ago, you'd have seen that Mark and his representatives claimed users were driving many of these alterations, which were not ultimately implemented without a fair bit of road testing on test users.
As an aside, would you prefer Google's approach to privacy? Their chairman recently said in a publicly available interview that if you don't want your stuff searchable, don't do those activities (my words). And that the Patriot Act was the final arbiter anyways.
Bear in mind that there are other perspectives on Facebook's privacy changes however.
One would be that a business with such a huge user base doesn't operate in any sort of vacuum. They have tech considerations of their own and of their partners, current and projected. And sure, some of that would involve things they will never reveal, such as requirements for maximizing the revenue stream from data mining companies.
Another factor is that Facebook is a private company responsible for the performance of their platform in a competitive environment – despite how comfortable their users may (and do) get with features etc, FB are not obliged to guarantee they'll always retain a certain look & feel, or original policies or whatever. As Mark said elsewhere on the Web they don't want to ever support multiple versions of their core code.
You've reinforced the notion that none of us likes change, especially when it is foisted on us apparently unilaterally (though see previous paragraph). And if the changes are that unacceptable, cancel using the service.
You also implied that FB didn't give you the option of confirming your new privacy settings before they were made available to the world. There was an app for that which all users should have responded to.
Thanks again for the gutsy piece. I've benefited by going off and delving more into the way Facebook as a corporation works, and – bringing it home – by changing my own privacy settings to suit how I'm using the platform at the moment.
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