Lunch Break: Sarah Palin's Facebook Page

One thing you may know about Sarah Palin, is how well she has adapted to the new online media (Facebook, Twitter) in order to speak directly to her supporters.  I've read some criticism of her approach in that it enables her to dodge tough questions that traditional media outlets would ask (Think Katie Couric: "...what newspapers and magazines did you regularly read before you were tapped for this — to stay informed and to understand the world?").  But, you have to hand it to her as a political figure who 'gets' the new media.

What I didn't have any idea about was the level of screening that goes into her Facebook page.  Check this (link) out from John Dickerson in Slate:

How much work does it take to keep everything so sanitized? To help me find out, my colleague Jeremy Singer-Vine wrote a program to capture comments to Palin's page before the clean-up crew could arrive. (Here's an explanation of how Jeremy's program works.) All these posts were initially public, if only for a few minutes. We looked at the comments to 10 Palin posts over 12 days, capturing the deletions in the 24 hours after the posts were live. In that period, a rough average of 10 percent of total posts were deleted.

10% doesn't seem like a heck of lot to me.  What really impressed me were the kind of comments that were edited.  Below are couple of interesting one from the article:

Polite disagreement. "Sarah, perception is everything! I learned that in the military. All you have to do is disassociate yourself from those Tea Partiers that are indeed racist and the NAACP gones [sic] away," wrote one in response to Palin's post on the NAACP's charge that the Tea Party tolerated racism. "Even they [the NAACP] admit the Tea Party is not a racist organization. Mrs. Palin, I believe you to be an honorable Woman. You believe in your cause. Sometimes for the good of the cause one has to make a stand even to those that support the cause. Remember John Mccain, circa 2008 in which a woman stood up and called Candidate Obama a Muslim. The Honorable John Mccain rebuked her. This could be your moment."

...

Too much agreement. "Do us a favor Sarah, trap a few Wolves and ship em to D.C., they do eat Rats don't they? Have a great trip Sarah, God Bless." 

The article identifies a few other types of comments that are edited (racial slurs, mean comments, anything about Obama's birth certificate, etc.).  Despite the latest 'family crisis', I still believe that she's running in 2012 for president and has as good a chance of any of the potential GOP candidates of winning their nomination.  Her ability to work the new media should prove handy in that upcoming battle.

I got sucked into Facebook

*** Language Warning ***

My Current Facebook Resolution

I created this site in response to my sincere annoyance at the owners of Facebook and their willful disregard for their users.  Several of my posts criticize Facebook and link to criticisms of their policy changes.  I stand by those posts.  It's all true.  The people who run Facebook SUCK.

They also have the most useful social media tool going today.  I admit that I hoped they would be taken down by their mistakes.  It isn't going to happen.  They hit the scale needed to keep growing and growing and displacing the other social media pages.  Let me put it this way.  Your parents bothered to set up Facebook profiles and some of them are actively using it.  Your parents are not moving away from this.  Neither is every other commercial entity that actively markets their own Facebook page.  Facebook won (for now).  Facebook is what the cable company was before the satellite providers.

So...  How do I reconcile my complete disdain for the owners with the overall usefulness of their services?  The key is this blog.  I'm going to make a new Facebook ID.  I'm going to make it completely public.  There is no way I can be surprised by changes in privacy policy when I've given up all pretense of having any privacy.  Then I'm going to completely minimize what I put into Facebook.  I figure they own anything I put into their system.  So what if I just post to my blog and... then use Facebook to link to my blog?  Now they can own the link but I control my content.  If I want to post photos, well, I'm NOT going to do it on Facebook.  I'll link to any number of the other sites that hosts pictures (Flickr, Picasa, Shutterfly, etc.).  Why should I give it to Facebook?  I know I can't trust them.  So I'll just give them the links.  To stuff I control.

To sum up, (1) Assume no privacy (2) Keep control of my material.  I get the benefits of the friend lists and the friend feed and the voyeuristic view of the people I used to know.  I keep the fun stuff.  And give Facebook as little as possible.

Will this work?  I can't say for sure.  It's worth a shot.  And I'll continually re-assess my stand.  I don't like these guys.  But there are plenty of business with services I use whose business practices I don't particularly care for (Think Comcast).  Upon reflection I believe I can make this relationship work.

Facebook = Openbook

Here's another example of how open Facebook is.  It's called Openbook and it's a Facebook profile search engine.  You can run searches on anything: "Rectal exam", "Copy and Paste", "I hate my job", etc...  Give it a try, here's the link.

That's pretty cool, right?  The more I think about Facebook as an issue the more I realize that all users need to understand that it's public.  The site owners want to make you think that you have control over your privacy, but because they can (and do) change their privacy standards all the time, you actually have no control.

So if you're going to use Facebook, just assume that any information you put out there will be picked apart by anyone who wants to pick it apart (Marketing Organizations, Russian Hackers, Spammers, Nosy People, Your Boss, Potential Clients, Potential Employers).  Assume that regardless of your privacy settings, you are fully public.  Then behave appropriately.  Remember any perceived control you believe you have over your privacy is false and potentially to your detriment.

(Hat Tip: Kevin Drum)

Untrustworthy Scumbags

The owners of Facebook are building a huge, searchable, database of all the important aspects of their user population. And they’re not shy about finding new ways to exploit it. Plus, it’s a bait and switch. “Here’s a great way to connect with family and friends that YOU can control. I mean WE can control. And we change the rules about WE and YOU any time it suits us. Have fun!”. And the beauty of the bait and switch is that it gets the user base comfortable with sharing information with each other. Why not, it’s fun to share. But then Facebook can change the default on that privately shared information from private to public as soon as it finds a market for the data. Then sell the information to highest bidder. And so long as they make the effort to hide previously private information difficult, but possible, they can still sell most of the data.  Enough of it to make some bucks on their (Not yours) valuable data.

I’m beginning to think the “private to public - bait and switch” IS their business model.

Frankly, they do create value for the users. I haven’t found a tool that works as well as theirs.  The network effect is amazing. You put a profile on and within a few months, you’ll reconnect with dozens of people you never thought you’d ever have contact with again.  It’s pretty amazing.

It’s too bad the owners are untrustworthy scumbags.

A Tipping Point?

Just another person cancelling their Facebook account.  Or is it?
(It probably is - but, I'd love to be at the beginning of this particular wave)

Here is James Kwak at the Baseline Scenario (link):

In short, there has been a massive, one-directional shift in how much of your information is visible by default either to everyone on Facebook, or to everyone on the Internet. Now, the usual defense of Facebook is that this is only by default; you can control information access via your privacy settings, which have gotten more fine-grained over time.

But this argument doesn’t fly for me. First of all, there is the problem that many people don’t realize they have this control and don’t use it. Second, finding and using those privacy settings is not trivial. But for years, I figured that I was savvy and careful enough to protect myself adequately. I’m not that paranoid about personal information on the Internet to begin with–there are various versions of my biography already floating around–and besides, I worked in the software industry for eight years (some of that time helping to design and configure software, not just market and sell it), so I should be able to figure this stuff out.

Wired Calls For A New Facebook

Link

This spring Facebook took that even further. All the items you list as things you like must become public and linked to public profile pages. If you don’t want them linked and made public, then you don’t get them — though Facebook nicely hangs onto them in its database in order to let advertisers target you.

This includes your music preferences, employment information, reading preferences, schools, etc. All the things that make up your profile. They all must be public — and linked to public pages for each of those bits of info — or you don’t get them at all. That’s hardly a choice, and the whole system is maddeningly complex.

Simultaneously, the company began shipping your profile information off pre-emptively to Yelp, Pandora and Microsoft — so that if you show up there while already logged into Facebook, the sites can “personalize” your experience when you show up. You can try to opt out after the fact, but you’ll need a master’s in Facebook bureaucracy to stop it permanently.

Another Facebook Post

Really just a link.

And a quote:

Facebook is a great service. I have a profile, and so does nearly everyone I know under the age of 60.

However, Facebook hasn't always managed its users' data well. In the beginning, it restricted the visibility of a user's personal information to just their friends and their "network" (college or school). Over the past couple of years, the default privacy settings for a Facebook user's personal information have become more and more permissive. They've also changed how your personal information is classified several times, sometimes in a manner that has been confusing for their users. This has largely been part of Facebook's effort to correlate, publish, and monetize their social graph: a massive database of entities and links that covers everything from where you live to the movies you like and the people you trust.

Kevin Drum on Facebook

Is Facebook Evil?

The more I read about Facebook, the more I really don't like Facebook. I'm way behind the curve on this stuff, but the other day I read a post about privacy settings and realized just how little I know about it. I've always been pretty sparse with my Facebook account, so I'm not really worried about my darkest secrets becoming public or anything, but after reading this and then following the links I went in and changed a whole bunch of settings that had made my preferences available to third parties at Facebook's whim. I had no idea these settings even existed. Then today I read this. "There is something seriously wrong with their business ethics," says Thomas Baekdal, "when they even contemplate publishing content that was previously marked private."

I guess I'm not the only one....

http://www.baekdal.com/opinion/facebook-is-dying-social-is-not/

Pressure is on Facebook

http://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2010/05/the-facebook-privacy-wars-heat-up/56344/

I'm happy to vote with my feet.  I mean how self-serving is this quote from Facebook's CEO:

When we got started in my dorm room at Harvard, the questions a lot of people asked was "Why would I want to put any information on the Internet at all?" People have really gotten comfortable not only sharing more information and different kinds, but more openly and with more people, and that social norm is just something that has evolved over time. We view it as our role in the system to constantly be innovating and updating what our system is to reflect what the current social norms are.

Right.  It's changing social norms.  Not a land grab.  Right.

Where's Wiebe

After the past couple weeks of watching Facebook do more and more 'site monetization', I decided that I was done with it. It's a touch decision because I've really enjoyed reconnecting with people I've had a hard time keeping in touch with. I also loved posting links and charts and pictures and every now and again, a thought or two.

This blog is going to be my way to try to keep the posting part of Facebook going. I expect my posts to be brief and probably a little more partisan that what I allowed myself to post on Facebook. Good for me! I have my doubts about having any kind of following, but who knows. If you're reading this, Welcome! I'd love your comments and thoughts. If you have something you want me to see, post a link in the comments. Think I'm full of it or taking my points too far - well, you're probably right, so tell me!

Anyway, I'd like to think I won't miss Facebook. I'll do this experiment, at least until the end of the summer. And we'll see how well it works.