While most people care about the information they choose to share online, they don’t care too much about Facebook’s move to make more of that information public — at least not enough to ditch the social media network altogether.
This care-but-don’t-care attitude was the general sentiment at a great Social Media Club of St. Louis event tonight at Schlafly Bottleworks in Maplewood. The event featured a heated debate on Facebook’s privacy policy between Brian Schwartz (@creativereason) of Spoke Marketing and Matt Ridings (@techguerilla) of MSR Consulting.
In case you’ve been under a rock, Facebook last month revised its privacy policy to require users to opt out if they wish to keep certain information private. The new default setting for Facebook makes all that information public and caused a minor raucous in social media circles.
What’s the big deal?
“Your privacy was dead long before Facebook make this change,” Schwartz said. “Privacy died a long time ago.”
Marketers have been collecting all kinds of personal data on web users for the better part of a decade, Schwartz said, and sometimes its more personal tidbits that anyone would be willing to share on Facebook. “Marketers aren’t doing this to be malicious, they’re doing it to optimize your web experience … to sell you a car.”
And it’s not just in Facebook. Anytime you send an e-mail, surf a website for a product, or offer an online review, information is captured, tracked and passed along to a marketer. The only way to opt out of the information sharing is to opt out of offering the information in the first place.
The bottom line is clear, Schwartz said: “Quit disclosing crap you don’t want people to see.”
Facebook’s gone too far
Facebook’s recent changes in its privacy policy, Ridings argued, go too far and violate the trust its users have instilled in the company. “There’s a big, big difference in putting your life out on the web [through Facebook] … and sending an e-mail to a company that might be forwarded on to someone else.”
Ridings liked the Facebook user experience to the anecdote of the boiling frog. The premise is that if a frog is placed in boiling water, it will jump out, but if it is placed in cold water that is slowly heated, it will not perceive the danger and will be cooked to death. “You’re the frog and [Facebook]‘s got the dial,” he said.
The largest question, according to Ridings, remains: Have they [Facebook] exposed themselves through the systematic abuse of trust or are they simply too big to fail?
Should a viable alternative to Facebook develop on the horizon, most in the audience suggested they would be willing to give it a shot. “It’s about trust; it’s about who you’ll do business with, Ridings said.
The problem is that such an alternative has yet to be created.
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Thanks for the write up Patrick, glad you made it in. I don’t know if you wrote this from your car after the event but your speed is pretty impressive!
-Brad (@JavaSTL)
I’m finding it more difficult to trust these social networking sites given their lack of privacy concerns. The facebook CEO also seems to have done some shady things in the early days of FB and has showed complete apathy towards the privacy concerns of the users. The lack of privacy is reaching absurd levels in social networking with other sites like Blippy appearing on the scene. Hopefully, facebook makes some changes soon.