Facebook: Smart or Stupid?
The other day, when I went to Facebook, I was greeted with an overlay message telling me that everything—interests, political and religious views, hometown, bra size—in my profile was now going to become a page, in order to enhance my “connections” to those things, and presenting me with a long list of all of these putative pages. (One of my interests as listed in my profile is “other stuff,” and I had to laugh when I saw that presented as a page—it would have a lot of fans, I’m guessing.) I had to go through and uncheck about 35 different nouns that were about to become pages. Why? Because I don’t want that type of “connection,” which shares my information with…well, potentially with everyone, including companies that want to market with me.
On a scale of one to pathological, I’m somewhere in the middle of the spectrum of worrying about privacy, but inching ever closer to the extremely concerned side. Maybe it’s my age (older), or my being from New York City, but I’m wary of letting anyone know very much about me. I realize that anyone who really wants to find out anything about me can probably do so without much effort at all, and I’m not exactly sure what I think will happen if I let people know what my political views are, or if they find out that I’m interested in “other stuff.” But I don’t want to find out, either.
In most ways, it’s a good and sometimes wonderful thing that our world is increasingly connected, but there are tradeoffs—and there are also ways in which the connectedness can cross over into the creepy. Facebook, more than any other social networking platform, seems to leap over that line again and again. And it’s not just me; most people I know turn off these “innovative” new Facebook features as soon as they learn about them.
And yet, Facebook is a brilliant company. They’ve shown many times over that they know what they’re doing. Their interface is just simple enough to not intimidate newbies but just orderly and attractive enough not to drive away more savvy users, unlike MySpace. Its decision to allow and even encourage third-party apps was made at exactly the right time, saving Facebook from becoming just another social networking site (and enabling it to finally and definitively beat MySpace). Everyone is on Facebook, probably including your mom. Facebook gets it.
So it’s doubly mystifying to me that Facebook seems to fundamentally not get it when it comes to privacy. And there are other ways in which they fail to get it, too. They seem to have trouble understanding that connectedness cuts across geographic boundaries, so they keep recommending that you become a fan of the local cafe that your friend halfway across the country likes. So I have to wonder: do they, on some fundamental level, simply not understand their users? Or do their commercial interests trump their users’ needs? Or is it something else entirely—that there’s an army of 14-year-old Facebook users who have been just itching to give up what’s left of their privacy and therefore embrace these new features, or even that Facebook thinks it’s acting in its users’ interest. I don’t know what the truth is, but I do know that a percentage of the everyone who’s on Facebook is starting to question that choice. And I’m beginning to think that Facebook is either the smartest dumb company in history, or the dumbest smart one. I’m just not sure which.
