The Facebook Value Proposition

OK, it's not cycling, but since I do post so much cycling stuff on Facebook, there is at least a connection...

Every day we as consumers make rational (and sometimes irrational!) purchasing decisions on a wide range of products and services. Sometimes we get what we pay for, sometimes we don't. There are a multitude of reasons why this value proposition works or doesn't work. Often the same "price" for a product or service is not right for different people as everyone has different criteria for what makes something a "good value". Many think the things that are sold on infomercials are stupid, but people must buy them because they are popular! A classic example. We should periodically revisit our personal criteria for the value of the products and services we buy as those services and their costs change over time. That's just the way the world works.

We are at such a crossroads with Facebook. There have been a lot of changes recently (last year or so) as Facebook has become wildly popular. We now have to revisit whether the "cost" of Facebook is worth the "product/service" we get in return. We all know the product/service we get - we wouldn't use Facebook if we didn't see some value in it - and that value is different for everyone. As for "cost" you ask? It's "free" right? Well, monetarily, yes it is free - and I'm sure will always be free despite the rumor mongering to the contrary - but the real cost is your "private" information.

The tech echo chamber is all abuzz with the-sky-is-falling-privacy-eroding-Facebook-is-tricking-us stories. However, despite the notices by Facebook about changes to their privacy policy and implementation of new features, most "normal" people who just use Facebook to share things with their friends either don't pay much attention to these or don't understand exactly what is happening because some of the concepts and more importantly their consequences are complicated. I personally am not a sky-is-falling privacy screamer. I do somewhat agree with Scott McNealy's comment from so many years ago: "You have zero privacy anyway … Get over it." Sure there is a lot of already public information about us online. That's not really what bothers me. What bothers me is that Facebook is essentially fundamentally changing it's service and I'm just not sure that it is still a "good value" for me. In addition, there is an odor of sleaze on the changes as it appears they are not very transparent and often very obscure.

I originally signed up to use Facebook as a way to share information with a select group of "friends", using the "lists" to control which people get to see what stuff. This is most likely beyond the standard "just use the default settings" scenario that most "normal" users (ie non geeks) use. For the most part that is all still true - in some cases maybe more so - I can still control who SEES what. So far, so good. Where things have changed is more fundamentally "under the hood" which IS a significant change to that original agreement to exchange a cost for a service.

Facebook is making moves to be "more social", meaning that there is a lot more "permeability" of information between boundaries in the application. By boundaries I mean what is shared outside of what you authorize. Use to be that you explicitly and in some cases implicitly authorized Facebook and applications to share your information, one of the reasons that I hate the "games" like Mafia Wars, Farmville and the like, but you could choose not to opt-in. What's changed is that this permeability is now almost exclusively OPT-OUT and in some cases you can NOT opt out. This for me changes the value proposition. You can read for yourself below about these changes that are well chronicled by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) in a series about the state of Facebook's privacy policy. Then ask yourself "is the cost of using Facebook - the information they collect about me and use - worth what I get from it?". I'm not so sure.

Facebook is essentially using us for a big experiment creating a very large "social graph" that they can then use for whatever purposes they want. I begrudgingly give them the right to create whatever business model they want - everyone needs to make money - I'm just not sure this is the service I want to buy for that price.

Certainly, one thing I have done is remove all of my likes, education, work, hobbies, music etc, because these are automatically "connected" to public "community" pages whether you want it or not (you can not opt out). Even then, it appears that if you remove these, the underlying connections remain. So what I might end up doing it deleting my current account and starting over, never contributing this information. But then, why would I go through the hassle?

I'm at the tipping point...

A Handy Facebook-to-English Translator
http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2010/04/handy-facebook-english-translator

Facebook's Eroding Privacy Policy: A Timeline
http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2010/04/facebook-timeline

Facebook "Instant Personalization" feature with other web sites
http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2010/04/how-opt-out-facebook-s-instant-personalization

Facebook "connections"
http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2010/05/things-you-need-know-about-facebook