Social networking privacy angst
Jun. 4th, 2010 06:15 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
livSo, we all know that Facebook is evil, and LiveJournal is fast heading towards becoming evil. Or incompetent indistinguishably from malice, anyway. I'm very much debating with myself whether I should be deleting my accounts.
The case for Facebook is a lot stronger: it brings me almost no joy, and its business model is, in fact, noxious rather than merely annoying (bait-and-switch people into giving up personal data which is then sold to advertisers and incidentally displayed to the whole internet). That actually doesn't bother me very much on a personal level; when I first joined, I didn't trust it, and I decided to include only information that I didn't mind having fully public. So when FB did exactly what I expected them to do and gave advertisers more and more access to my data, I didn't really care. And when they went beyond what I normally expect from any profit-driven, advert-based website and changed the defaults so that a whole lot of stuff was exposed, and quite a proportion of it was public without any choice in the matter, it didn't really affect me.
The thing is, I have sympathy for the kind of people who go around saying that the internet is better without privacy. I am really nosy, and I enjoy having lots of information available. I find seductive the idea that you should just be careful not to do anything you might be ashamed of, rather than hope that the world won't find out about your words and actions. But the reason I'm able to look at things from that perspective is that my life is pretty cushy in lots of ways. I am not likely to lose my job based on speaking incautiously online. I don't have any enemies or stalkers. There aren't many people who hate me for being who I am; this is by no means universally true, but I live in a society where being gay and Jewish don't cause me any significant problems.
But I'm close enough to people who don't have those advantages to realize that privacy is, in fact, important. People like Zuckerberg and Scoble may not (think they) know anybody at all who needs privacy as a matter of life and death. I know women who have escaped from abusive partners and offspring who have escaped from abusive parents. I know gay and trans people who face major problems, even violence, if the wrong person finds out. I know people whose lives are marginal enough that they have to accept shitty jobs where the boss can fire them if they don't like their political opinions. (In countries like the USA, lacking a functional welfare state, being fired can mean being homeless or without access to medical care, so this isn't just a financial thing.) I know political refugees and people living and working illegally in the country they've chosen. I know people who get a certain amount of grief just for existing with a set of religious beliefs or an ethnic background or simply being female, and who don't need that kind of grief to follow them off the internet and into their real world.
Saying that people like that shouldn't use the internet is completely the wrong solution. The internet is a really important source of social connection, all the more necessary for someone whose family and local community may be hostile. Now obviously, people have to understand that anything on the internet is potentially public, but it's not at all fair to sell a site on the basis that personal details, attached to a real name, are private within the limits reasonable for internet security, and then suddenly decide it's more profitable to expose them to advertisers and the internet at large.
The problem I have here is that the biggest source of privacy breaches is other people being careless with your data, and the bad guys mining social graphs. Even though I personally don't mind quite a lot of real world data being out there, I have to be careful for the sake of my friends. So although Facebook is noxious, it's not really harming me. Obviously people have chosen to use Facebook, and it's their responsibility to take whatever precautions they need, but they made that choice based on what turned out to be false advertising, and they don't control what I choose to post there. And really, the only way to let Facebook know that their behaviour is unacceptable is to vote with our feet, not just put up with anything they throw at us.
Reasons for not leaving Facebook: there are a lot of people from my life who are otherwise not on the internet, who find even email too geeky. I honestly don't understand why these people think FB is better than the alternatives, because to me it's worse in almost every way. But I don't want to lose those people. Also, the killer app is the event management stuff; if you're trying to arrange a party or meeting or whatever with a miscellaneous group, FB actually works really well. That bit, facilitating in person socializing, really benefits from FB's concept of social networking under real names. In particular, the Jewish Society here pretty much exclusively use Facebook, and I would be causing them a serious nuisance by refusing to participate.
The situation with LJ is kind of analogous, though obviously not as extreme. For a start, LJ doesn't generally involve blogging under real names, unless people choose to do that. And secondly, I don't think that LJ is really actively evil, they're just not quite sure whether their business model is using advertising to pay for the service they provide their users, or using their users to provide data and eyeballs for advertising. But I'm pretty unimpressed with the poor level of security that accompanies their increasingly desperate attempts to make money from adverts; I'm not happy about the second, slightly less buggy but still evil, version of the transmitting information about and altering moused over links to steal affiliate revenue. I'm not happy that LJ are so incredibly reluctant to enforce their rules about malware in adverts.
The thing is that two people defriended me on LJ, because I posted that I intended to use Dreamwidth's upcoming cross-site authenticated reading list functionality to read their posts from my Dreamwidth page instead of my LJ one. These people are not stupid, they are not paranoid, they have very, very good reasons to want very good control over what they post to LJ. They've chosen to trust LJ, which I personally don't, so in that sense my using LJ is not a problem for them. But there are other people who are equally concerned about information leakage, but less technologically savvy, who may not even be aware how glaringly insecure LJ has become.
But the major problem I have is that deleting my LJ account would make things worse, not better. If I logged in with my Dreamwidth OpenID, you'd all have the hassle of having to add that account to your friends list. And I'd still be creating content which makes LJ more interesting and therefore more lucrative for advertisers. But worst of all, I'd lose the advantage of having a permanent account, which is that I don't see most adverts. I'd make my LJ activities more, not less insecure! Not to mention more annoying, obviously. I would also be providing LJ with more, not less, revenue, because they'd be able to advertise to me, and right now I'm not giving them any new money because I don't have an account that I renew. (I'm not worried about the money I spent on the permanent account; that has already given me six years of happiness, which I think is a very good deal for $150, so that in itself is not an argument against deleting.) And of course there are all the positive things that LJ does, the people there whom I really care about, the things I love about the interface. One compromise might be to delete all the content from my entries, and use the account purely for commenting; I'm a little reluctant to do that because it would mean breaking five years' worth of links, and they're probably not that important in the scheme of things, but I'm still hesitant. Morally, though, I think it's probably the right thing to do.
![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
siderea believes in Diaspora as a Facebook killer, and I really, really hope she's right. But I have a hard time believing that a distributed, self-hosted system is going to be accessible enough to non-geeks. Or even enough better than Facebook for people to be willing to give up the networks they've already built up. Which is of course exactly why I'm still on Facebook however uncomfortable I feel about it.
The case for Facebook is a lot stronger: it brings me almost no joy, and its business model is, in fact, noxious rather than merely annoying (bait-and-switch people into giving up personal data which is then sold to advertisers and incidentally displayed to the whole internet). That actually doesn't bother me very much on a personal level; when I first joined, I didn't trust it, and I decided to include only information that I didn't mind having fully public. So when FB did exactly what I expected them to do and gave advertisers more and more access to my data, I didn't really care. And when they went beyond what I normally expect from any profit-driven, advert-based website and changed the defaults so that a whole lot of stuff was exposed, and quite a proportion of it was public without any choice in the matter, it didn't really affect me.
The thing is, I have sympathy for the kind of people who go around saying that the internet is better without privacy. I am really nosy, and I enjoy having lots of information available. I find seductive the idea that you should just be careful not to do anything you might be ashamed of, rather than hope that the world won't find out about your words and actions. But the reason I'm able to look at things from that perspective is that my life is pretty cushy in lots of ways. I am not likely to lose my job based on speaking incautiously online. I don't have any enemies or stalkers. There aren't many people who hate me for being who I am; this is by no means universally true, but I live in a society where being gay and Jewish don't cause me any significant problems.
But I'm close enough to people who don't have those advantages to realize that privacy is, in fact, important. People like Zuckerberg and Scoble may not (think they) know anybody at all who needs privacy as a matter of life and death. I know women who have escaped from abusive partners and offspring who have escaped from abusive parents. I know gay and trans people who face major problems, even violence, if the wrong person finds out. I know people whose lives are marginal enough that they have to accept shitty jobs where the boss can fire them if they don't like their political opinions. (In countries like the USA, lacking a functional welfare state, being fired can mean being homeless or without access to medical care, so this isn't just a financial thing.) I know political refugees and people living and working illegally in the country they've chosen. I know people who get a certain amount of grief just for existing with a set of religious beliefs or an ethnic background or simply being female, and who don't need that kind of grief to follow them off the internet and into their real world.
Saying that people like that shouldn't use the internet is completely the wrong solution. The internet is a really important source of social connection, all the more necessary for someone whose family and local community may be hostile. Now obviously, people have to understand that anything on the internet is potentially public, but it's not at all fair to sell a site on the basis that personal details, attached to a real name, are private within the limits reasonable for internet security, and then suddenly decide it's more profitable to expose them to advertisers and the internet at large.
The problem I have here is that the biggest source of privacy breaches is other people being careless with your data, and the bad guys mining social graphs. Even though I personally don't mind quite a lot of real world data being out there, I have to be careful for the sake of my friends. So although Facebook is noxious, it's not really harming me. Obviously people have chosen to use Facebook, and it's their responsibility to take whatever precautions they need, but they made that choice based on what turned out to be false advertising, and they don't control what I choose to post there. And really, the only way to let Facebook know that their behaviour is unacceptable is to vote with our feet, not just put up with anything they throw at us.
Reasons for not leaving Facebook: there are a lot of people from my life who are otherwise not on the internet, who find even email too geeky. I honestly don't understand why these people think FB is better than the alternatives, because to me it's worse in almost every way. But I don't want to lose those people. Also, the killer app is the event management stuff; if you're trying to arrange a party or meeting or whatever with a miscellaneous group, FB actually works really well. That bit, facilitating in person socializing, really benefits from FB's concept of social networking under real names. In particular, the Jewish Society here pretty much exclusively use Facebook, and I would be causing them a serious nuisance by refusing to participate.
The situation with LJ is kind of analogous, though obviously not as extreme. For a start, LJ doesn't generally involve blogging under real names, unless people choose to do that. And secondly, I don't think that LJ is really actively evil, they're just not quite sure whether their business model is using advertising to pay for the service they provide their users, or using their users to provide data and eyeballs for advertising. But I'm pretty unimpressed with the poor level of security that accompanies their increasingly desperate attempts to make money from adverts; I'm not happy about the second, slightly less buggy but still evil, version of the transmitting information about and altering moused over links to steal affiliate revenue. I'm not happy that LJ are so incredibly reluctant to enforce their rules about malware in adverts.
The thing is that two people defriended me on LJ, because I posted that I intended to use Dreamwidth's upcoming cross-site authenticated reading list functionality to read their posts from my Dreamwidth page instead of my LJ one. These people are not stupid, they are not paranoid, they have very, very good reasons to want very good control over what they post to LJ. They've chosen to trust LJ, which I personally don't, so in that sense my using LJ is not a problem for them. But there are other people who are equally concerned about information leakage, but less technologically savvy, who may not even be aware how glaringly insecure LJ has become.
But the major problem I have is that deleting my LJ account would make things worse, not better. If I logged in with my Dreamwidth OpenID, you'd all have the hassle of having to add that account to your friends list. And I'd still be creating content which makes LJ more interesting and therefore more lucrative for advertisers. But worst of all, I'd lose the advantage of having a permanent account, which is that I don't see most adverts. I'd make my LJ activities more, not less insecure! Not to mention more annoying, obviously. I would also be providing LJ with more, not less, revenue, because they'd be able to advertise to me, and right now I'm not giving them any new money because I don't have an account that I renew. (I'm not worried about the money I spent on the permanent account; that has already given me six years of happiness, which I think is a very good deal for $150, so that in itself is not an argument against deleting.) And of course there are all the positive things that LJ does, the people there whom I really care about, the things I love about the interface. One compromise might be to delete all the content from my entries, and use the account purely for commenting; I'm a little reluctant to do that because it would mean breaking five years' worth of links, and they're probably not that important in the scheme of things, but I'm still hesitant. Morally, though, I think it's probably the right thing to do.
siderea believes in Diaspora as a Facebook killer, and I really, really hope she's right. But I have a hard time believing that a distributed, self-hosted system is going to be accessible enough to non-geeks. Or even enough better than Facebook for people to be willing to give up the networks they've already built up. Which is of course exactly why I'm still on Facebook however uncomfortable I feel about it.
(no subject)
Date: 2010-06-05 12:37 am (UTC)Doing it LJ to DW shouldn't be too bad: they both have the same API, so you're "just" looking for entries with the same date and content (assuming when DW imports stuff it gives it the same date). LJ's XML-RPC stuff isn't too bad to deal with from Python.