Is Facebook evil ?
I guess you’ve heard the negative buzz about Facebook and it’s new policy concerning your data (or their, who knows?). Marc Zuckerberg reacted to the “All your data are belong to us” rumor. You can read the original post here.
In a few words, he says “blah blah blah… it’s complicated”. No surprise! But reading the TechCrunch post about this new explanation to calm down the Facebook generation, I was a bit surprized by the metaphore used:
When you share your data with someone else, whether it be an email or a photo, it becomes their data as well. You cannot normally rescind data you share with other people in an e-mail. So why should a social network be any different
It sounds a bit easy of a comparison to me.
I send a photo to a friend, it’s right that my friend can keep this photo… BUT
- Facebook itself is NOT my friend !
- Facebook is not 1 person I share something, it’s more about a company sharing with third parties.
- A friend is somewhat a local storage of this information. After I publish something on Facebook, who the hell knows where it can be…
IMHO, this is not a question about “let’s be more permissive, because it’s online media“, it is now time to define a basic rules set about online privacy. Facebook already benefited a lot of this ‘empty’ juridical place.
Tough times call for tough measures, and even if I understand Facebook need to secure it’s value, I think we should not tolerate such deviation in the use of personal data shared among friends.
sarbogsat said,
Wrote on February 17, 2009 @ 10:55
It’s the CLOUD man! Nothing is local copy anymore, it’s a copy in a database!
Totophe said,
Wrote on February 17, 2009 @ 11:08
As it is said on Wikipedia about fiends: “Friends will welcome each other’s company and exhibit loyalty towards each other, often to the point of altruism.” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friendship)
I think there is a big confusion or missunderstanding of what “friend” means.
Friendship require rules, in that rules, not sharing our datas with someone else is one of them. There is small exceptions but Facebook is definitly not one of them.
That would be my first “strike point” to respond to that stupid metaphore…
tnt said,
Wrote on February 17, 2009 @ 19:43
When you send a email to someone, sure they get a local copy that they can’t delete. But they don’t get legal ownership of the content, or the right to redistribute or sub-license it …
I mean … if you email a photo to someone, that doesn’t mean he can go an publish it or resell it ! Same thing, if you send a novel to someone for comments, that doesn’t mean he can take it and go sell it himself …
That facebook has some archived copy, that’s alright with me. But that they have the right to show it is something that the poster should be able to revoke. And the fact that it essentially becomes _their_ content is just silly …