Why the Angry Campaign Against Facebook Won't Succeed

(MoneyWatch)  For Facebook, the last two weeks have been a public relations hell. Politicians are trying to haul the company in for questioning and the Web is abuzz with lengthy rants about why the company is evil and its users should quit. The truth is, this public anger is just part of a cycle we've seen before. Facebook will continue to expand the boundaries of what people share, provoking outcry, but remaining the largest and fastest growing social network on the web.

The bare minimum of what you can keep private on Facebook has certainly shrunk over the years. As this terrific little animation by Matt Mckeon shows, the default privacy settings have changed every year, pushing more and more of your basic data to larger and larger circles. Each one of these expansions has brought a wave of complaints, and sometimes Facebook has pulled back, albeit temporarily. But the number of people who felt so uncomfortable with these changes that they quit is dwarfed by the number of new users who joined.

The company isn't dumb, or drunk on power. As Elliot Schrage, Vice President for Public Policy, told the NYT recently, the company tested out dozens of variations of upcoming system changes on millions of users for months before taking it live. The Catch-22 is that no matter how Facebook rolls outs new changes, critics will find an angle of attack. "To date, we've been criticized for making things too complicated when we provide granular controls and for not providing enough control when we make things simple," says Schrage.

What you share with other users is half the battle. The other major complaint leveled at the company is that it's looking to decrease privacy so it can sell more of your information to outside companies. This is a large part of how the company has become profitable, but it's hardly nefarious.

A recent anti-Facebook essay on Gizmodo compared this practice to your phone company deciding to tap your calls. But unlike a phone conversation, the data that Facebook harvests from you isn't personally identifiable. "Our targeting is anonymous," Schrage told the NYT. "We don't identify or share names. Period. Think of a magazine selling ads based on the demographics and perceived interests of its readers. We don't sell the subscriber list. We protect the names."

Facebook's best growth recently has been in Europe, a continent with a far stricter public conception of privacy than our own. And as I wrote last week, the new privacy bill proposed by Congress will simply add an official seal of approval to what Facebook is already doing.

The public exodus of tech intellectuals from Facebook may continue for a while, as it should. The best response for those who disagree with the company's policies is to quit. But anyone who thinks that Facebook has overshot the sentiment of global users hasn't seen the writing on the wall. In this day and age people learn, often the hard way, what they should and shouldn't share. But once they do, they go back to business as usual.

Image from kateandneil.com Graph of Privacy from mattmckeon.com:click to expand

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