Privacy advocates opposed to new privacy regulations at Facebook are attempting to get the attention of the U.S. Federal Trade Commission, according to a complaint filed Thursday on behalf of the Electronic Privacy Information Center and several allied groups.
"These changes violate user expectations, diminish user privacy, and contradict Facebook's own representations," the complaint says of Facebook's new regulations, which push more content public, and make even more data available to third-party applications and advertisers. EPIC's goal is to force Facebook to restore the old settings and add additional controls for members.
"We've had productive discussions with dozens of organizations around the world about the recent changes, and we're disappointed that EPIC has chosen to share their concerns with the FTC while refusing to talk to us about them," a retaliatory statement from Facebook read. "We're pleased that so many users have already gone through the process of reviewing and updating their privacy settings, and are impressed that so many have chosen to customize their settings, demonstrating the effectiveness of Facebook's user empowerment and transparency efforts. Of course, the new tools offer users the opportunity to decide on privacy with every photo, link, or status update they wish to post, so the process of personalizing privacy on Facebook will continue."
It's one thing when Facebook users start complaining about new features that they deem excessively creepy--just look at the outrage that surrounded the News Feed, now a mainstay of the site, when it launched in 2006.
It's a bigger fish entirely when government regulatory bodies get involved, particularly the FTC, which has major sway over the advertising and marketing industries. It was only when privacy groups flagged concerns about Facebook's Beacon advertising program two years ago that participating advertisers started to pull out amid bad publicity. A class action settlement over the Beacon program was resolved recently.
Since then, Facebook hasn't had a privacy-related debacle on the same scale. Much of the philosophy behind Beacon was baked into its Facebook Connect universal log-in tool, which shares information from third-party sites on Facebook profiles and lets users log into other sites with their Facebook credentials. But with the public-relations pitch geared toward making the entire online experience easier for users (fewer passwords to remember, no more registration headaches) rather than helping advertisers exploit social-networking channels, the debut of Facebook Connect wasn't subject to the same scrutiny.
The controversial new privacy standards at Facebook have been a long time coming, considering the fact that the social network started to publicly set the groundwork nearly six months ago with a series of announcements about modified privacy controls. It's clear that the company was trying to avoid the sort of press bloodbath that came after the debut of Beacon.
That didn't happen. Facebook has already backtracked on one component of its new privacy regulations, one which made users' friends lists publicly available. It's unclear as to how much EPIC's coalition, not to mention the FTC, will prioritize this most recent controversy.
Behind Facebook's traditional willingness to make tweaks and modifications to new features and products, if they spark some kind of concern among government regulatory bodies or marketers, is a fight that the company will not give up easily. What it all comes down to is that Facebook's once-watertight log-in wall--remember the time that representatives mulled banning a blogger who'd posted Facebook-hosted photos publicly?--is getting in the way of the social network's potentially central role in one of the digital world's crazes du jour, searchable real-time information.
Search companies have been announcing big deals to pull Facebook status messages and Twitter tweets into results, and the media business has gone nuts over the potential to harness the "real-time Web."
Facebook, dependent on advertising revenues and still looking to expand its base of more than 350 million users, obviously wants in on this. But if it doesn't have enough status messages, shared links, and other information pulled into search results, it stands a chance at losing ground to the much-smaller Twitter--already the top name, in terms of a massive, searchable clearinghouse for up-to-the-minute information.
Plus, there are marketers and advertisers for Facebook to consider: more search results equals more page views and more ad revenue, and more public information on users' profiles means more ways for the advertising industry to reach them. But if those same marketers and advertisers are the ones pressuring Facebook to change course, in terms of user privacy, it could cause some friction between the social network and the businesses that have finally begun to accept it as a choice destination for their ad dollars.
Now EPIC is alleging to the FTC that Facebook's new regulations can be outright dangerous: "Dozens of American Facebook users, who posted political messages critical of Iran, have reported that Iranian authorities subsequently questioned and detained their relatives," an item in the complaint reads. "Under the revised privacy settings, Facebook makes such users' friends lists publicly available."
That's not good PR for Facebook, which has repeatedly pitched itself as a destination for open dialogue and grassroots organization across zones of political and ethnic conflict.
NEW YORK--Former Six Apart executive and well-read blogger Anil Dash has a new gig: he announced at the Web 2.0 Expo here on Wednesday that he will be the director of Expert Labs, a new nonprofit that will take the dot-com incubator model and apply it to new digital tools for the federal government.
"Despite what our ego tends to think in the tech industry, the issue is not that we need to have more tweeting from the White House," Dash said onstage. "(We can) help them learn the lessons that we've seen over the past half decade of Web 2.0's ascendence."
Expert Labs, which is a division of the American Association for the Advancement of Science that's funded by the MacArthur Foundation, will match digital voids and holes in government and policy with the developers who can fill them, with grant money paying for the work. The organization also hopes to host developer competitions, a similar move to some municipal projects like New York's "Big Apps."
It's not a government agency, but the Expert Labs Web site explains that "we've been privileged enough to connect with agencies and departments across the federal government, from the White House on down." Cutting through bureaucracy, needless to say, will still be a challenge. Dash is unfazed.
"If we tap into the expertise of each community, there's enormous potential," he said. "So we're going to ask policymakers for their expertise in defining the questions that we need answered." Then, Expert Labs plans to hook those projects up with technologists who can build the requisite systems, and then to members of the science and academic communities to help solve the issues at hand.
"No matter how smart the policymakers are in our government...there's always going to be more experts outside the Beltway," Dash said. "The tactics thus far have been a closed-door meeting with a half dozen people for an hour."
He asserted, "The Web has changed the way that works."
NEW YORK--The state senate in Albany was in a bit of a shambles Monday. So instead of speaking in-person at the Personal Democracy Forum as planned, NY Mayor Michael Bloomberg used Skype to make his keynote address.
"Through the miracles of modern communication, we're essentially together," Bloomberg commented to the audience at the Frederick P. Rose auditorium here in midtown Manhattan. He then spoke about how New York is using the assets of the digital age to make more information available to the city's residents--something that Bloomberg can pitch well, considering he made a fortune as the founder of the business news and information company that bears his name.
Mayor Michael Bloomberg
(Credit: NYC.gov)Bloomberg's new initiatives include Skype and Twitter accounts for NYC 311, the city's information hotline that Bloomberg launched several years ago; a partnership with Google to get more detailed information about exactly what people are searching for on municipal government sites (and what they can and can't find); and "Big Apps," a new contest for developers to crunch and remix city data into Web or mobile applications for the masses.
The economy, however, may get in the way. Any ambitious new city projects are taken with a grain of salt these days, and with good reason.
I, for one, was scrambling to get to Bloomberg's talk on time because cutbacks and delays on the B-D-F-V subway line had added literally an extra half-hour to my commute from downtown to the conference venue at Columbus Circle. Griping about the city budget is pretty commonplace around here these days, and Bloomberg himself is no exception.
"If any of you from around the world wants to move here," Bloomberg quipped over the Skype connection when conference organizer Andrew Rasiej commented that a thousand people were on hand, "we would love to have you. We need taxpayers."
The official information available on the Web to New York residents includes public school progress data and citywide performance reporting. Beyond that, Bloomberg's administration has chosen to support new and more efficient ways of doing business: it has given the thumbs-up to collaborative workspaces and launched a venture fund for tech and finance start-ups, among other things. These are all part of a way to combat the fact that the Wall Street meltdown has left scores of the city's professionals out of work.
With "Big Apps," Bloomberg is encouraging developers to participate in a contest that "will challenge all of you, and the whole tech world, really, to come up with new applications using city data."
"We'll be releasing a huge volume of data from a number of agencies," Bloomberg said before the Skype connection briefly cut off. Rasiej re-dialed in, and Bloomberg continued that he hopes the fruits of Big Apps contests will "create the connectedness that will benefit the city economically, civically, and socially."
If developers aren't willing to act solely out of a desire to help the city, Bloomberg said that Big Apps will indeed have cash prizes, as well as an even bigger incentive.
"I'll up the ante by taking the grand-prize winners out to dinner," he said.
Good to hear that's still in the budget.
Facebook's targeted advertising program is "materially different from behavioral targeting as it is usually discussed," Chris Kelly, the social network's chief privacy officer, said in remarks prepared for a Thursday morning hearing before two House subcommittees.
"In offering its free service to users, Facebook is dedicated to developing advertising that is relevant and personal without invading users' privacy, and to giving users more control over how their personal information is used in the online advertising environment," read the remarks for two subcommittees of the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Energy and Commerce.
The hearing, titled "Behavioral Advertising: Industry Practices And Consumers' Expectations," was also slated to include testimonies from Jeffrey Chester, executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy; Scott Cleland, president of Precursor; Charles Curran, executive director of the Network Advertising Initiative; Edward Felten, director of the Center for Information Technology Policy at Princeton University; Anne Toth, vice president of policy and head of privacy at Yahoo; and Nicole Wong, deputy general counsel at Google.
Chris Kelly
(Credit: Kelly2010.com)Kelly, a White House staffer under President Clinton, has announced an exploratory bid to run for attorney general in California.
Social-media sites like Facebook, where members fill out extensive personal profiles that can detail everything from their music tastes to travel plans to political leanings, are at the forefront of new developments in behavioral ad targeting. The Facebook Ads program lets advertisers fine-tune their campaigns to reach specific demographics and audiences. Kelly insisted that this does not constitute an invasion of user privacy, an Internet-wide concern that the Federal Trade Commission has been exploring at the request of privacy advocates.
"The FTC's behavioral advertising principles recognize the important distinctions made by Facebook in its ad targeting between the use of aggregate, non-personally identifiable information that is not shared or sold to third parties," Kelly's remarks read, "versus other sites' and companies surreptitious harvesting, sharing and sale of personally identifiable information to third party companies."
Privacy concerns are nothing new to Facebook. The social network went through a user backlash over the introduction of its News Feed in 2006, and a bigger one over the controversial Beacon advertising program. More recently, a revision to Facebook's terms of use prompted consumer advocacy blog The Consumerist to highlight language that it said meant that Facebook claimed ownership of user profile data and photos.
"In February of this year, we looked to revise our Terms of Use, simplifying them to cut out as much legalese as possible and explain them in plain language," Kelly's remarks explained. "When we released a first version of our new terms, a blog misinterpreted our simplification of our copyright license, claiming that it meant we were seeking to own user content. The user reaction was predictably swift and severe, and we needed to choose among weathering the storm, revising the language, and introducing an entirely new process that would directly involve users in the governance of the site."
Facebook ultimately underwent a "notice and comment period modeled in part on the federal government's rulemaking procedure...(with) a user vote at the end of the process."
The points he tried to drive home the most: that Facebook members have extensive control over their personal information and that Facebook does not allow advertisers access to "personally identifiable" data in the Facebook Ads program.
Kelly also included a general mea culpa of sorts: "Perhaps because our site has developed so quickly, Facebook may have sometimes been inartful in communicating with our users and the general public about our advertising products," he stated. "We learned many lessons about the importance of user education and extensive control from the imperfect introduction of our Beacon product in 2007. As a result, Facebook continues to be dedicated to empowering consumers to control their information in both the noncommercial and the commercial context because we believe that should be the future of advertising."
A few other interesting tidbits from Kelly's remarks: out of Facebook's 200-million-plus active users, about 65 million are in the U.S.; more than 10,000 sites are using the Facebook Connect universal log-in product; and Facebook plans to continue the discussion-and-feedback-period strategy on any future changes to its "critical site documents."
A State Department press briefing gives some insight into why the U.S. government requested that Twitter postpone a scheduled downtime during a crucial period in the post-election upheaval in Iran.
"I think, as I was following this, these developments over the weekend...I began to recognize the importance of new social media as a vital tool for citizens' empowerment and as a way for people to get their messages out," State Department spokesman Ian Kelly said Tuesday, according to a transcript of the department's daily press briefing (which was not held specifically to address the Twitter question). "And it was very clear to me that these kinds of social media played a very important role in democracy, spreading the word about what was going on."
CNN reported Tuesday that the State Department had been behind the decision by Twitter and its hosting provider to reschedule the downtime for an hour when it would be the middle of the night in the Iranian capital of Tehran.
Kelly was then asked to comment on "discussions that (the State Department is) having with networking sites about maintaining the technology, about how the State Department as an institution is monitoring these type of sites to gain information about what's going on."
His response: "We're monitoring many different media, including some of these sites. And we've had, of course, talks with Twitter as well...I don't want to go into the detail of the nature of those talks right now."
Another reporter then pointed out that "by not providing any information on the nature of the talks, it indicates that you have some role in kind of providing messages to Twitter, messages to Iranians."
Kelly denied this. He said he was not sure who exactly within the State Department had been in touch with Twitter and added that "we use a number of social media outlets, and we're in constant contact with them. And as I said before, we were, of course, monitoring the situation through a number of different media, including social media networks like Facebook and Twitter...this is about the Iranian people. This is about giving their voices a chance to be heard. One of the ways that their voices are heard are through new media."
With the Iranian government clamping down on foreign journalists, Kelly has a point: access to Twitter and ilk are crucial sources of information.
Social media tools like Twitter and Facebook have already emerged as sources of raw news in disasters and political crises before--from the Hudson River emergency plane landing to the terrorist attacks in Mumbai. But this is the first time they've been highlighted as vital information channels in Iran--both for protesters trying to spread information and for government authorities trying to gather it.
When Twitter rescheduled some planned downtime in order to stay accessible for Iranian users in the midst of political upheaval, it was at the request of the U.S. State Department, according to CNN.
This should not be taken to mean that the U.S. is attempting to get involved at this point, CNN added. The State Department is working with multiple social-networking and communication services to ensure that conversation and information channels stay active.
"By necessity, the U.S. is staying hands-off of the election drama playing out in Iran, and officials say they are not providing messages to Iranians or 'quarterbacking' the disputed election process," the article by CNN's Elise Labott read.
Because the U.S. has no diplomatic relations with Iran, information gathered on the Web is crucial to its understanding of the post-election unrest that has led to mass protests and fatal clashes with police. Twitter, where users have been filtering relevant information with the hashtag #iranelection, has been a crucial hotspot for raw news.
Twitter's planned maintenance, according to a post on the company's official blog, was selected by its hosting partner, NTT America. The update is "a critical network upgrade [that] must be performed to ensure continued operation of Twitter," however, so it will instead take place this afternoon when it's well after midnight in Iran.
Meanwhile, in a sort of digital twist on that famous scene in The Thomas Crowne Affair, a new viral campaign is going around Twitter: Users from around the world are resetting the location data in their profiles to Tehran, the capital of Iran, in order to confuse Iranian authorities who may be attempting to use the microblogging tool to track down opposition activity.
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