[LINK] SMH: 'Facebook's scary secret'

[Roger Clarke]

[The significance of the Comment below is that it's in the Business 
section of the Fairfax papers.  Doubting Zuckerberg is becoming 
mainstream.]

Facebook's scary secret
Stephen Hutcheon
SMH / Age
October 8, 2010
http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/society-and-culture/facebooks-scary-secret-20101007-169ni.html

Mark Zuckerberg preaches 'radical transparency', but what is he hiding?

IN THE movie The Social Network, Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg is cast 
as a conniving, sociopathic ''asshole'' who shafts his co-founder and 
rips off an idea for an online community that later becomes his 
social networking site.

The real Mark Zuckerberg prefers to be seen as a social visionary.In 
a new book, The Facebook Effect, he tells his biographer that he 
wants to make the world a better place by creating an online 
environment that fosters openness and sharing.

Moviegoers can make up their own mind about the Zuckerberg character 
when The Social Network opens in Australia later this month. As for 
the real one, it may take more time to see if the vision thing is for 
real or just a bunch of weasel words.

One thing's for sure, he's a clever one. Harvard's most celebrated 
dropout since Bill Gates wants to turn an already popular website 
into a indispensable platform that becomes a kind of web within the 
web and which can be integrated into all manner of electronic 
devices, ranging from mobile phones to TV sets. This will have 
privacy implications across all facets of our lives, not just when 
we're in front of a computer.

Yesterday, Facebook took a big step in the right direction by 
announcing changes designed to boost confidence in the way it handles 
personal information supplied by its 500 million-plus members. These 
acknowledge that not all friends are equal and that you don't have to 
share every scintilla of information you decide to post with everyone 
on your extended friends list.

Facebook will also allow users to see and manage how third parties 
use their "public" information. And it has introduced a way to bundle 
the entire contents of a user's profile and pop it into a portable 
compacted file.

Until now, the company had shown contempt for its users' privacy and 
has had to make regular tactical retreats after overstepping the mark 
and exposing a reckless disregard for the sanctity of personal 
information. These misadventures were not mistakes. They reflect 
Zuckerberg's personal philosophy of "radical transparency". In 
January, he told an audience that the concept of privacy was passe, 
that it was no longer a ''social norm''.

While the advent of the world wide web has helped to diminish the 
need to hit the privacy panic button as frequently, there is still a 
gulf between Facebook's concept of the norm and everyone else's.

If Zuckerberg actually believes that transparency "will help create a 
healthier society", he should lead by example. Facebook should also 
be detailing the extent of the vast trove of personal metadata that 
is being compiled on the back of information supplied directly and 
indirectly by its members.

Too much of the Facebook-flouts-privacy debate, however, has centred 
on control over the known information that users willingly divulge on 
their pages and those of their friends.

What has been overlooked is the hoovering up of the digital 
fingerprints we leave in our online meanderings. These can be sorted, 
aggregated and then linked back, not to a semi-anonymous IP address 
or a browser ID, put to a real person with a real name.

Then there's the inferred data, or what Columbia University law 
professor Eben Moglen calls "the data in the holes between the data 
we already know if we know enough things". And we have no way of 
knowing what has been collected, recombined, shared and stashed in 
places we never knew existed, with companies and organisations we 
never consented to allow into our lives.

For example, every time you click one of those ubiquitous Facebook 
"Like" buttons, which have now spread well beyond the borders of 
Facebook itself. Or when you update your whereabouts using Facebook 
Places, the company's new geo-location service.

They always knew your name, age and gender. Now they can tell what 
you like and where you are or where you have been.

And you know what comes next? By knowing where you have been, they'll 
be able to work out where you are going. Heading home after work? 
Let's flash up an ad that offers you a discount at your favourite 
Thai takeaway. Some people may see that as a convenience. I find it 
creepy. The moment my phone informs me that it knows what I'm going 
to do next is the moment I ditch the phone.

Facebook's advantage over the likes of Google is that it can deliver 
a more accurate demographic slice of the audience to advertisers. I 
have no problem with that, as long as I know everything that is being 
logged under my name and that if I choose not to allow it, there is 
guarantee that when I choose to remove my data, all of it disappears 
from Facebook's servers immediately and forever.

But this is Facebook's secret sauce, so it's not likely to share it 
without a fight. And as it grows, Facebook continues to fly below the 
radar because it remains in private hands, thereby avoiding the kind 
of intense regulatory scrutiny that comes with a sharemarket listing.

In any case, legislation in this area can't keep pace with the rate 
of change. Supervisors and watchdogs either don't have the skills to 
tackle well-funded adversaries or don't have the brief to keep them 
honest.

Yesterday's announcement by Facebook will help to change the 
perception that the company is just a data miner posing as a social 
network. But that perception won't be put to rest until we see more 
evidence that Zuckerberg's "radical transparency" vision will apply 
first to Facebook's own dealings.

Stephen Hutcheon is a Fairfax Media online editor.


-- 
Roger Clarke                                 http://www.rogerclarke.com/
			            
Xamax Consultancy Pty Ltd      78 Sidaway St, Chapman ACT 2611 AUSTRALIA
                    Tel: +61 2 6288 1472, and 6288 6916
mailto:Roger.Clarke at xamax.com.au                http://www.xamax.com.au/

Visiting Professor in the Cyberspace Law & Policy Centre      Uni of NSW
Visiting Professor in Computer Science    Australian National University