What’s missing from Mark Zuckerberg’s defense of Facebook

May 24, 2010 4:42 PM

In his Washington Post op-ed today, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg responds to the furor surrounding Facebook’s privacy and security practices.

Citing the challenge of serving a rapidly growing community of hundreds of millions, he admits that mistakes were made and assures the public that the service is listening to them and that easier control over personal information will arrive soon.

“The biggest message we have heard recently is that people want easier control over their information,” he writes.

If Facebook is truly listening to the public outcry over its practices, maybe it needs a hearing aid. The biggest message that I’ve heard isn’t that people want easier controls (although they certainly do). It’s that they don’t want Facebook to betray their trust by turning the details of their personal lives into profit-making commodities without their permission.

Let’s get real about this: Permission means prior permission.

You don’t get someone’s “permission” to borrow their car by snatching their keys and, as you start the engine, telling them, “Unless you opt-out, you’ve given me permission to take this baby for a spin.”

Yet, by assuming its users’ permission to share their personal information with its business partners unless those users take advantage of an opt-out procedure of Facebook’s devising (no matter how easy it is to use), Facebook betrays their trust. Plain and simple. And that’s wrong.

Zuckerberg also defends Facebook’s information sharing on the grounds that “many people choose to make some of their information visible to everyone so people they know can find them on Facebook.”

Of course some people, if asked, would make such a choice. But in many cases, Facebook doesn’t ask. For its own corporate interests, Facebook itself chooses to make information visible. (For example, by automatically setting the “default” privacy setting for sharing your birth date to “friends of friends,” a choice that many users might not make.)

True, in some cases it does inform users it is doing this and offers them a way to reverse that decision. But again, that’s a case of letting the user close the barn door after the horse is halfway across pasture.

And as Consumer Reports’s recent national survey found, many consumers never close that barn door: Based on the responses of Facebook users, we projected that millions of them didn’t even know the service had privacy controls, while millions more chose not to use them.

Facebook has lots of other privacy and security issues that Zuckerberg didn’t address in his article and which making the controls easier won’t solve. My colleagues and I at Consumer Reports will soon describe them in detail, and recommend actions Facebook should take to better respect its users’ privacy.

I’d appreciate hearing your opinions on this issue, and all issues surrounding Facebook’s privacy and security practices.