I know a girl whom everybody knows. Sometimes I tease her about knowing everybody, but then she tells me that she doesn’t know everybody knows her and I say, okay, fair enough. You see, when she joined Facebook, she made a pledge to herself that she would only ask one hundred people to be her friend. This is a pledge she has, to her credit and to my continued amazement, stuck to, keeping requests under twenty; her friend list possesses a supernatural fecundity – even for online proliferation.
My teasing, even this indirect, erudite teasing, is warranted, but it also turns out to be entirely misguided.
Facebook has come under a great deal of scrutiny in the past month. The critiques have come from, among others, Congress and consumer groups that cased the Federal Trade Commission, in January, to write a letter saying the complaints raised "a number of concerns about Facebook's information sharing practices."
That din precipitated over the following five months. Today we find ourselves with a semi-official "Quit Facebook Day," organized by a website of which you’ll never guess the name (it’s QuitFacebook.com). The site currently has fewer participants than my aforementioned friend has "friends" on Facebook, plus, they’re going about this all wrong.
Quit Facebook Day calls for as many users as possible to leave the online networking site on May 31, 2010 in protest of the changes to privacy policies the company adopted in April. Those changes include, the "default settings on its social-networking platform to the detriment of a user," the "concept of an ‘open graph,’ which is intended to create a larger, more social Facebook community across the web, and "Community Pages, intended to provide information about various topics."
In an e-mail to Computerworld last Thursday morning, "a Facebook spokesman confirmed that the company will hold a meeting later today to discuss privacy issues, but he would not say whether executives are looking to make significant changes to the popular site's highly contentious privacy policy."
While they seemingly have not shares the notes of that meeting, Facebook added to their defense that the company gives "our users granular controls [that] enable each user to customize many individual settings in order to share, or protect, as much information as they feel comfortable with…We already enable users to exclude themselves from being indexed by search engines, and recently introduced granular data permissions for applications."
This is all true; I excluded myself from search engines last week. However, here is the resounding compliant with the privacy settings on Facebook: figuring them out is tougher than figuring out Macy Gray’s gender. In an NPR story two weeks ago, commentators and panel guests attested to the potential difficulties "deactivating" and the potential impossibilities "deleting" your Facebook account. One commentator concluded the story by announcing, "and you can find us on Twitter at…" (By the way, although he didn’t mention it, you can also find them on Facebook at: http://www.facebook.com/NPR.)
One participant on the NPR program explained, You can delete your account, but when you do so the site asks you if you’re sure and then tells you that you’ll never be able to talk to so-and-so again and then tells you that your aunt is really going to miss you."
At that point, you’re faced with a decision: Is contact with your Aunt Gretchen worth forfeiting your electronic privacy and personal data?
While deactivating your Facebook account will keep things on "hold and online," and while deleting your Facebook account will take things off the internet, neither will delete your personal information and web of connections from Facebook’s database(s). Any agency with enough power or money will be able to access information regarding your attachments and messages to those attachments for pretty much ever. Which means, next time you want to get the Jason Bourne out of here and wreak some international havoc, you’re screwed.
The only way to possibly beat Facebook at their own game is to do exactly what my friend who knows everyone, excuse me whom everyone knows, has done; accrue as many connections as possible. I admit it. She was right at I was wrong. If the very connected person has, according to Malcolm Gladwell, a social network of over one hundred people (even I have that on Facebook; the average seems to be around 400 on the networking site), the only way to keep your information private is to obfuscate, convolute and dilute your online network as much as possible. If you’re connected to 3,500 people and send messages rarely or somewhat equally to those people, there is absolutely no way to tell who is in your closest network. Thirty-five hundred doors are way too many leads, even for those sneaky bastards in Mossad. Trust me.
Therefore, instead of Quitting Facebook Day, I propose Nothing But Facebook Day (it’s a working title) in which we each sign up for the network (if we’ve not already) and spend a solid eight to ten hours requesting and accepting as many friends as possible. You don’t fight a behemoth with slings and arrows; you fight it with another behemoth. The only way we can do that is if we climb on each other’s shoulders. I’ll be on the bottom.
