The Unknown Studio

Turns out some aspects of Beacon were/are probably illegal. Check out this analysis.

Another member of a professorial mailing list I’m on asked whether Facebook may have violated the Video Privacy Protection Act of 1988. Nicknamed the “Bork Bill” (a newspaper published his video rental records during his confirmation hearings), the VPPA protects your privacy in the videos you rent and buy. Well, guess what? One of Facebook’s Beacon partners was Blockbuster, so some of the items that wound up in people’s news feeds were the names of videos they’d bought. Oops.

I dug a bit into the legalities of the issue, and this is roughly what I came up with: Facebook and Blockbuster should hunker down and prepare for the lawsuits. Their recent move to allowing a global opt-out may cut them off from accruing further liability, but there’s probably an overhang of damages facing them from their past mistakes. I should note that this isn’t my usual area of law, so salt the analysis appropriately. Caselaw on the VPPA is thin, but there might be other rules of information privacy law out there that would significantly change the bottom line.

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After giving it considerable thought over the last few weeks, and with the advent and somewhat-demise of Beacon, I’ve decided that I’m going to go through the pain-in-the-ass process of deleting my Facebook account tonight. Some of the reasons include what Amy Tiemann said in this CNET piece:

You remember the old story about the frog placed in a pot of water that was slowly heated up, until it was cooked? When I read the about Facebook’s reaction to the anti-Beacon protests, my first impression is that Facebook’s concessions are essentially along the lines of, “OK, we turned up the heat a bit too much on this one, so we’ll turn it back down a little bit–for now.” Are marketers counting on the fact that we’ll get used to the warm bath, then the hot tub, calibrating their fine-tuned ability to stop just short of the lobster pot?

Moreover, while the web allows a largely indiscriminate flow of information, which has benefitted millions, certainly, the door swings both ways. And what little information I’ve been able to glean and share about my friends and acquaintances (willingly or not) during my short stint on Facebook (about a year), I’m growing old and curmugeonly, and am far less interested in what some douche from grade school is up to these days than I might have been a few months ago.

Ultimately, I just don’t feel comfortable with the lack of transparency around what Facebook is up to. If they were just straight and honest with their users, I might stick around. But right now, the risk of having my personal info up there, surrounded by all the uncertainly with what’s happening with that info, is unsettling.

I’ll just stick to emailing my close friends, thanks.

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There’s been a huge buzz lately about Facebook’s attempt to roll out Beacon, an application that would effectively track anything you purchase online, and then post the purchase to your Facebook newsfeed. What I find most astonishing is that Facebook’s creator, Mark Zuckerberg, seems surprised at the backlash against Beacon.

First Coca-Cola jumped ship (though it’s not really clear how the Coke deal would work; every time I buy a soda from a vending machine people on my newsfeed will know? And they’ll know I’m drinking—gasp!—vanilla coke? Sweet shit!). Then Overstock. Now it sounds like Travelocity is getting the fuck out of Dodge.

How could Zuckerberg not have seen this? Duh. He’s surrounded himself with a group of people hell-bent on monetizing a largely useless web service. Yes it brings people together and allows them to share photos and wall posts. Then what? Yeah, exactly. That’s what big Z and his cronies are struggling with right now. They sit in the Barad-dûr penthouse, right beneath the eye of Sauron, smack dab in the centre of Mordor, and wouldn’t you know it? They’ve completely lost touch with the most important part of the entire Facebook network: the user.

The concept of social networks, as codified in web 2.0 format, is fairly new. And it’s easy to lose sight of what Facebook was trying to do in the first place (connect people better than MySpace or Friendster ever could), especially when they have a team of billion-dollar investors demanding to know just how the hell Z-berg’s going to make money.

Meanwhile, you have a bunch of mouth-breathers willing to fork over the most mundane and questionable details about their piddly little lives, and it seems like it wouldn’t be much of a stretch to invade their privacy just a touch more. But Facebook isn’t a Legion of Idiots. Some deeply intelligent people use it as well. To play Scrabulous.
And stalk their girlfriends.

And we… uh, I mean, those people are worried about privacy. They use Facebook out of necessity. Because everyone else does. Just like everyone else uses the telephone. It’s not that these people love Facebook. Some of them eventually grow to resent it, and abandon their accounts. But those who don’t have taken it upon themselves to protect the aforementioned mouth-breathers from their own feeblemindedness.

That’s where groups like Moveon.org come in. These excellent people fought the good fight and called to task the creators of Beacon and their Facebook progenitors. They pointed out some of the fatal flaws inherent in the application, and companies like Coke and Overstock took notice.

At its most basic, this means that Facebook friends in your network won’t be able to find out what you got them for Christmas. And it’s more important, it means people’s privacy will be violated only if they want it to be.

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