Have you seen Mark Zuckerberg parading around totally stark naked?
Jan 13th 2008NiaLLLarkinfacebook & privacy
A modern re-working of the children’s classic:
Some years ago, there was a merchant prince who was riding the crest of the kingdom’s latest social networking craze.
The one problem was that his network had grown up to have the same user-privacy issues that plagued his forerunners.
One day he heard from two swindlers who told him that they could make the finest privacy controls the world had ever seen. These controls, they said, would not only be highly granular but also extremely easy to use. And, as if that wasn’t enough, these controls had a special magical quality in that their value was invisible to anyone who was either stupid, careless, lazy or ill-informed.
Being a bit nervous about whether he himself would be able to see the value of these new controls, our young prince first sent two of his trusted men to make evaluations. Of course, neither would admit that they could not see any meaningful value for the users and so praised them.
The prince and his trusted advisers then announced that these new controls solved the issues of privacy for all except those too stupid to recognize this or too lazy and careless to be beyond help.
The prince and his advisers went on to promote the new controls all over town, never giving into their personal reservations that the new controls were tiresome to use and kinda icky too in the way they expected you to define and distinguish between your friends. In fact they didn’t actually really use them themselves but didn’t say so because they were afraid that the other people would think them stupid.
Of course, many of the prominent townspeople went out of their way to lavish wild praise on the magnificent controls introduced by the prince, while denying the fact that they knew them to be unwieldy and impracticable too, until some people started saying what was on everyone’s mind:
“Facebook doesn’t give a hoot about your privacy!”
This got whispered from person to person until everyone in the crowd was shrugging their shoulders and starting to slip away. The prince noticed this and couldn’t help feeling the game was up, but held his head high and continued with his procession, thinking ‘what else am I to do’.
And that, dear readers, is the story of one of the ways the overwhelming majority of Facebook users, despite individually recognizing the absurdity of the entire scenario continue to engage with a service they themselves feel has had its day.
[Breaking news...And with neat timing, this just in from Pat Phelan on twitter explaining why he has retired from facebook and Robin Blandford too... ]
5 Comments »
Paul Walsh on 13 Jan 2008 at 3:17 pm #
“until some people starting to say what was in everyone’s mind” - not it wasn’t ;) I’ve never been afraid to say what was wrong with FB. I just see the need in the context of whatever posts you’ve happened to read :)
Marcus Mac Innes on 13 Jan 2008 at 3:58 pm #
Funny… I recently got an email from a friend who runs a very successful web company for the last 7 years after I connected with him on LinkedIn. He said:
“Hi Marcus
I have totally lost track of all these facespacelinklaxo things and stopped them all. They’re snakeoil, they just wanna own our lives.
Drop me a mail any time, hope all is great with you.”
:)
James Corbett on 15 Jan 2008 at 9:49 am #
Heh, Blandford and Phelan are late to the party - I closed my Facebook account months ago! :-)
NiaLLLarkin on 15 Jan 2008 at 1:25 pm #
@james I’m going to write another post on the basis of your comment (^_^)
@Marcus Your story seems to both champion and villify social networks. Which is cool. Because I’d certainly share such mixed feeling myself. I experience existing online SNs as amazingly useful and often creepy and icky. I think we all do. The thing is a lot of people seem to believe that that you can’t have one without the other. Its my view that the same fundamental blueprint underlying all the social networks we have today gives rise to the good and bad we see in todays experience of social networking.
For me this means that the way forward is to rethink the underlying architecture. Design again from bottom up using even a slightly better understanding of sociologic. This is not such a big deal as the existing blueprint was put otgether in a matter of days and was such a success that it has stuck in a ‘if it ain’t borke don’t fix it way’. We can make a good first step by going beyond the flawed metaphor of the social “network” and start using the more realisitic metaphor of the social “cloud”.
@PaulWalsh Firstly my apologies. That sentence fragment you pulled out was horrible. The grammar was so mangled as to make me ashamed of myself! Thanks for highlighting it and giving me the chance to correct it.
And my apologies again. My mangled grammar seems to have had a contagious quality and warped my mind because I now can’t make sense of this part of your comment.
“I just see the need in the context of whatever posts you’ve happened to read :)”
Clunky Flow » Can the last person leaving Facebook turn out the lights? on 15 Jan 2008 at 2:01 pm #
[...] Robin Blandford has mostly lost interest in Facebook. Pat Phelan has left. And James Corbett closed down his account a long time ago (scroll to comments). [...]