December 9, 2009
Does Facebook have Aspbergers?
Facebook has settled a class action lawsuit and officially ended its “Beacon” program that posted into your feed news of what you’ve bought at other sites. Beacon was a contentious program to begin with, and was initially implemented with defaults that worked against users’ interests.
It was odd when Facebook introduced Beacon. As Ethanz recounts, Facebook’s privacy officer (I believe) previewed the announcement at the Berkman Center the day before it went public, and seemed genuinely surprised that we pushed back about the privacy implications, and about the fact that the system’s defaults were set to serve Facebook’s interests, not its users’. And this was not the first time that Facebook made changes that didn’t align with what their users want and expect.
The cheap irony is that Facebook exists because it enables its users to create and maintain intimacy (ok, intimacy of a sometimes weird new form), yet it seems not to be able to read the signals of intimacy. How does that happen? It might be that Facebook is a crassly commercial enterprise that cynically clothes itself in aspirational humanism. But my hunch is that that’s wrong. I think (based on little evidence, admittedly) that Facebook views itself as a noble enabler of what is best about us, but that it has a surprisingly tin ear for how its actions appear to its users.
The good news is that if Facebook suffers from Inflammation of the Tin Ear, the malady exists at the organizational level, and thus can be remedied at that level. The ending of Beacon and the creation of a non-profit to study privacy issues is a good step, albeit one that required the tough love of a class action suit. For a site that requires us to trust it with intimate knowledge, it’d help if we could believe that our love was requited, or at least that Facebook is always, implicitly and unveeringly on our side.
