Maybe Ask should give Facebook an award for privacy education
By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial
Posted in Privacy, Identity, Security, Internet on
I’m not a big Facebook fan. Part of it is that I’ve seen a lot of online communities, from Usenet and the uniquely British CIX to AOL and Web forums and IRC and LiveJournal andLinked in - and the evolution of online behaviour that occurs in all of them is the same. Food fights and virtual flowers replace SIG files and ASCII art but a me-too meme is the same whether it’s plain text or fancy CSS (and don’t get me started on second life because that’s a whole ‘nother rant).
But I’m not an online Luddite. I live in email and IRC. Simon and I met online (in a virtual bar, when it took a really long time to explain to people what a virtual bar is. Online interactions can be efficient, lightweight and productive or rich and deep. Being able to find and connect to people you know is both fun and useful. Sharing what you do online is all fun and games until someone finds out what you’re buying them for Christmas (or in a Love, Actually manner, what you bought for someone who isn’t them).
Facebook has scaled back its Beacon advertising programme and issued a disingenuous ‘my bad!’ apology that still makes it sound more like a feature for users than a revenue stream for Facebook. After all, the apology doesn’t say you can opt out of having what you do on partner sites like Blockbuster sent to Facebook in the first place. It says “If you select that you don’t want to share some Beacon actions or if you turn off Beacon, then Facebook won’t store those actions even when partners send them to Facebook.” Facebook could still use the details to optimise the ads you and your friends see, and there’s nothing in the privacy settings to let you turn that off.
I’m not the only one who thinks this is irresponsible. There’s been a lot of complaining going on - from a VP at Microsoft who reports to Ray Ozzie trashing both Facebook and Blockbuster publicly to the sterling efforts of Valleywag -the Silicon Valley equivalent of Private Eye - to find out exactly what information Beacon does and doesn’t store. There’s been some back and forth between Facebook and Harvard’s 02138 magazine over whether it was OK to put court documents about damages to the college house where Facebook was written and Mark Zuckerberg’s response to the Harvard disciplinary committee online or whether that was an infringement of privacy (Facebook took the magazine to court and lost).
But while I’ve been excoriating Facebook for not buying a clue about how to treat information users never gave it permission to publish, it struck me that maybe we should be thanking them. After all, Facebook has done more for public awareness of privacy issues than any number of well-meaning campaigns. A bit like HMRC and data security, Facebook has made sure that people all over the world care a little bit more who knows what about them. It’s an excellent time for Ask to launch its new privacy feature, AskEraser, where you give up the personalisation search engines thing we want in favour of the privacy some of us actually prize.
The option has been in development for a while - it takes time to code these things up - so the timing is just luck for Ask. It’s an opt-in system, so you have to click and turn it on and accept a cookie that says nothing but ‘privacy please’ - and if you try to use a feature that relies on personalisation you’ll get the option to turn it back on. Ask promises that details like your IP address and search terms will be scrubbed off the system swiftly. They’re not expecting enough people to choose the option to cause problems with the analytics they use to tune searches based on how people use the results.
If I was searching for something I really didn’t want anyone to know about, I’d use an anonymising proxy. Ask will still have some information about you that lets them comply with legal demands. But this is an excellent opportunity for people to show that actually, we don’t care if your company thinks using us to market to our friends is just the same as me saying voluntarily that I like to shop with John Lewis for the service, support and never knowingly undersold bit, we’d like to choose who we have those conversations with and when. If what I have to hide is Simon’s Christmas present or just my personal business, why should you get to broadcast it without permission to make money from it?
Facebook has made a lot more people consider what’s personalisation and what’s an invasion of privacy. Head over to Ask.com and you’ve got a chance to have your view counted.
-Mary
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