All Your Informations Are Belong to Me

A storm is brewing around Facebook and its cavalier treatment of users' privacy. Over the weekend the Washington Post published an op-ed piece by Facebook's CEO designed to defuse some of the criticism. Commenting on that piece was a Monday Wall Street Journal article by Jessica Vascellaro that re-lit the subject, making it look like the Facebook pledge was fairly weak. But WSJ wasn't alone, the criticisms have become a flood:

Facebook CEO pledges another privacy rework (CBC)
Tension Building At Facebook As Staffers Challenge Zuckerberg's Approach To Privacy (BusinessInsider)*
Facebook Grapples With Privacy Issues (Wall Street Journal) (Jessica Vascellaro)
Dumb f***s (Forbes) (Meghan Casserly)
Facebook CEO Accused of Securities Fraud (slashdot)
Facebook CEO’s latest woe: accusations of securities fraud (VentureBeat)
Facebook Issues Statement On Latest Zuckerberg IM And Company Attitude Toward Privacy (BusinessInsider)

The shape of Facebook's grand strategy seems to be to take advantage of naivete wherever possible, then expose user data and expect that users will then forgive this slight by agreeing that it was all for their benefit anyway, as though Facebook knows better what is good for users than the users themselves do. From the WSJ article: "he [Facebook's CEO] has made no secret that he believes users should and will want to make more information about themselves public over time. "

Developers Can Exploit Facebook User Data
Facebook earlier deployed a series of programming tools that developers can use to add content to their websites. A lot of that content comes from the private data of individual users. One such site is YourOpenBook.org.

As of the time of this blog post, these were recent Searches:
my vulva
"I'm over it"
"jose gomez"
nigger
gay
win borden
interracial
acne
shaved my head
my new pictures
skinny dipping
lost virginity
my new number
"lost my virginity"
getting a divorce
naughty pics
had a threesome
slutty pictures
im a lesbian
radical muslim

Pick anything, and you get real pictures of real people, complete strangers, telling you exactly about their vulva or divorce or how they had a threesome or are radical muslim.

Go ahead, try it.

Coming Next
There is so much more to write on this topic, and how it intersects with economics and politics and the future of commerce. Future posts will explore each of these in turn.


* I first encountered a Forbes story, but that story is little more than a wrap of a BusinessInsider story which is in turn a wrap of a Wall Street Journal story. So for this news story, in effect, Forbes is suckling from the WSJ information stream. We chose the BusinessInsider headline because it was more colorful.