RFID, GPS Technology and Electronic Surveillance

Facebook's Eroding Privacy Policy: A Timeline

April 28, 2010

Electronic Frontier Foundation - Since its incorporation just over five years ago, Facebook has undergone a remarkable transformation. When it started, it was a private space for communication with a group of your choice. Soon, it transformed into a platform where much of your information is public by default. Today, it has become a platform where you have no choice but to make certain information public, and this public information may be shared by Facebook with its partner websites and used to target ads.

To help illustrate Facebook's shift away from privacy, we have highlighted some excerpts from Facebook's privacy policies over the years. Watch closely as your privacy disappears, one small change at a time!

Facebook Privacy Policy circa 2005:

No personal information that you submit to Thefacebook will be available to any user of the Web Site who does not belong to at least one of the groups specified by you in your privacy settings.

Facebook Privacy Policy circa 2006:

We understand you may not want everyone in the world to have the information you share on Facebook; that is why we give you control of your information. Our default privacy settings limit the information displayed in your profile to your school, your specified local area, and other reasonable community limitations that we tell you about.

Facebook Privacy Policy circa 2007:

Profile information you submit to Facebook will be available to users of Facebook who belong to at least one of the networks you allow to access the information through your privacy settings (e.g., school, geography, friends of friends). Your name, school name, and profile picture thumbnail will be available in search results across the Facebook network unless you alter your privacy settings.

Facebook Privacy Policy circa November 2009:

Facebook is designed to make it easy for you to share your information with anyone you want. You decide how much information you feel comfortable sharing on Facebook and you control how it is distributed through your privacy settings. You should review the default privacy settings and change them if necessary to reflect your preferences. You should also consider your settings whenever you share information.

Information set to “everyone” is publicly available information, may be accessed by everyone on the Internet (including people not logged into Facebook), is subject to indexing by third party search engines, may be associated with you outside of Facebook (such as when you visit other sites on the internet), and may be imported and exported by us and others without privacy limitations. The default privacy setting for certain types of information you post on Facebook is set to “everyone.” You can review and change the default settings in your privacy settings.

Facebook Privacy Policy circa December 2009:

Certain categories of information such as your name, profile photo, list of friends and pages you are a fan of, gender, geographic region, and networks you belong to are considered publicly available to everyone, including Facebook-enhanced applications, and therefore do not have privacy settings. You can, however, limit the ability of others to find this information through search using your search privacy settings.

Current Facebook Privacy Policy, as of April 2010:

When you connect with an application or website it will have access to General Information about you. The term General Information includes your and your friends’ names, profile pictures, gender, user IDs, connections, and any content shared using the Everyone privacy setting. ... The default privacy setting for certain types of information you post on Facebook is set to “everyone.” ... Because it takes two to connect, your privacy settings only control who can see the connection on your profile page. If you are uncomfortable with the connection being publicly available, you should consider removing (or not making) the connection.

Viewed together, the successive policies tell a clear story. Facebook originally earned its core base of users by offering them simple and powerful controls over their personal information. As Facebook grew larger and became more important, it could have chosen to maintain or improve those controls. Instead, it's slowly but surely helped itself — and its advertising and business partners — to more and more of its users' information, while limiting the users' options to control their own information.

Facebook Credits: The World's First Major Virtual Currency?

April 29, 2010

BNet - Facebook is projected to do over a billion dollars in revenue this year, more than some small countries, and its 400 million strong userbase is larger than the population of most big ones.

So why shouldn’t the social network have its own private currency? In the future, we may pay for some goods not with dollars, yen or euros, but with Facebook Credits.

Credits wasn’t the biggest news last week for Facebook, which announced an aggressive initiative to make itself the consumer web’s connective tissue that CEO Mark Zuckerberg called “the most transformative thing we have ever done.”

Creating a new virtual economy is a pretty big deal too, but Credits, which allow people to buy units of a virtual currency that can then be spent on various applications across Facebook, remained in the background. That’s because the program is still in private beta — independent payment companies control most of the $1 billion virtual goods market.

But most of those virtual goods are sold on Facebook itself, on games like Zynga’s FarmVille, in which players can buy special items for their farms and gifts for friends. Selling these in-game items, which help gamers get ahead more quickly, has turned into a big business very quickly, but Facebook isn’t far behind; the company looks impatient to start taking a cut. Credits would do just that, giving Facebook a solid 30 percent of the pie.

That’s not the best deal for companies like Zynga and Playdom that sell the virtual goods, and it’s a terrible one for the current payment processors, but it’s starting to look like Facebook might push out the competition, according to Inside Social Games:

At its f8 developer conference this week, company chief executive Mark Zuckerberg told Bloomberg that “‘there’s just going to be one currency that people use on all apps.” Later that day, Facebook’s Deb Liu was presenting about Facebook’s Credits plans, and she was asked if Facebook would continue to allow people to use third-party virtual currency services like Social Gold. She replied: “It’s still too early to tell, Credits is still in beta.”

Together with Zuckerberg’s statement, that sounds like it could be simply “no.” Another possibility is that third party virtual currency services can continue to exist, but will just be much less used than Credits, at least partially due to incentives Facebook will give to developers who use Credits — like free marketing.

At the same conference where the new Open Graph was announced, Zuckerberg told press that Credits aren’t about the revenue for Facebook. Journalists may be math-disabled, but even they can figure out what a 30 percent cut of a billion dollars is. (Hint: It’s a lot of money.)

But Facebook hasn’t yet come off as the bully. That’s partially because Facebook’s various representatives haven’t yet said anything firm, but mainly because the new model, even with its huge cut of each transaction, could ultimately be great for the social game and app companies that would have to switch to Credits.

The advantage is a lower barrier to adoption for users, who would have the advantage of only having to pay into a single system, and being able to take their pool of Credits to any app. The difference doesn’t seem immediately important, but there’s plenty of evidence from the iPhone that users care about convenience — anecdotally, the iPhone has triple the average revenue per user that Facebook apps do. (Apple, by the way, also takes 30 percent.)

So if Facebook can create a similar system, they’ll open the way for virtual goods to become a lot bigger than a billion dollar market, and possibly for other apps besides games to successfully tap into the virtual economy. Exactly how far this would go, nobody knows, because if Facebook succeeds with its plans, it will have created the world’s first major virtual economy.