As Silicon Valley executives, developers and analysts absorbed Facebook’s masterstroke this week, propagating a lightweight “like” button across the internet, most were impressed–some so much that they predicted Facebook would one day overtake Google.
Facebook Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg appears to have learned from past mistakes and avoided setting off a massive outcry from privacy advocates. That means adoption probably will be massive.
But that likelihood is stoking a deeper current of nervousness. The thinking goes something like this: Facebook, which keeps making more user information public, is soon going to know and share a lot more about its 400m audience and where else they’ve been on the Web.
Even if it doesn’t do anything dramatically inappropriate in the short term, Facebook is building a closed universe of personal data that by corporate nature it wants to cash in on. The more Facebook may come to rival Google and Apple in power, the more it becomes apparent that people don’t trust it in the same way.
The sense of unease is hard to quantify. But one flash-point is the fact that specially privileged partner sites–so far, just three of them–that have what Facebook calls “Instant Personalisation”. When you visit one of the sites, unless you opt out, they automatically get access to what Facebook has decreed to be “public” information about you.
That used to be your name and not much else. Then, late last year, it was expanded to include your list of friends. In the past week, that trove was broadened again, to include your picture and self-described interests.
A number of Facebook users posted objections as their status messages on Friday, urging their friends to “Go to Account > Privacy Settings > Applications and Websites > Instant Personalization > Change setting, then unclick `allow.’ Share this with others who care about FB privacy.”
Not everyone is spreading the message out of altruism. Some Google engineers deactivated their Facebook accounts in protest, then ruined the effect by praising their employer’s own privacy-eroding service Buzz.
One of the more thoughtful complaints so far has come from longtime search analyst Danny Sullivan, who recounted recent privacy problems at Google and suggested that every information-grab by one of the giant companies made it more likely that the other would try something similar.
“A lot of people feel like we’re pawns in the game between Google and Facebook for Web domination,” Mr Sullivan wrote. “Enough is enough.”
But if the Big Like works as well as many in Silicon Valley think it will, it might be hard for Facebook to agree.
