Why Facebook Needs "Inward-Facing" Privacy
Google (GOOG) has closed its data pipe to Facebook, according to the BBC. Starting in a few weeks, Google users will no longer be able to pull their Google contacts into Facebook when searching for friends. This isn't huge deal for Facebook right now, but if it ignores Google's mandate, its data policy will sow bigger problems in the future.
Until now, any website could use Google's API, or application programming interface, to pull Google data into their site with a user's permission. Now Google is only allowing their data to flow to sites that share data back. Talking to the BBC, Google said:
We have decided to change our approach slightly to reflect the fact that users often aren't aware that once they have imported their contacts into sites like Facebook, they are effectively trapped.Google presumably wants reciprocity from Facebook because it may be building its own social network, it wants users to be able to import their Facebook contacts to Google's network. Understandably, Facebook is not enthused. But data "portability" has advantages for both platforms: a movable list of "friends" means more profiles and more usage for both Google and Facebook. Clearly Facebook feels it has enough leverage to remain a silo, and if they do publicly respond -- which they haven't yet -- it will probably be with some boilerplate comments about privacy.
But a new open-data policy at Facebook would reduce would help it stay in users' good graces as it scales to enormous proportions. It would also solve many of their privacy headaches. Here's why.
- Portable data means that users stay because of preference, not because they have to. Facebook has historically been good about responding to user feedback (as they did when they killed Facebook Beacon.) But keeping people's information in a locked box destroys that communication channel. If users feel confined, they won't be enfranchised in Facebook's improvement -- they'll just wait for an opportunity to jump ship. I'm not suggesting that they'll delete their accounts; that's almost unthinkable for many people, since Facebook has become our de facto phone-book. But they will shunt their social and sharing activity to other services, driving down pageviews for Facebook.
- Users want "inward facing" privacy. There are half a billion people on Facebook, and there will be several billion registered users in another year or two. Now add Facebook Places, the network's new location-based service, and you'll have lots of "profiles" for small businesses and other locales. That could be upwards of 10 billion total profiles in just a few years. This kind of scale presents problems when searching: the phone-book has gotten much too thick. We need third-party Facebook apps that let you slice and dice Facebook's giant pool of profiles in useful ways. This will lead to much more powerful third-party search engines, and new tools for marketers, advertisers and special-interest groups.
- Making Facebook's pool of profiles available to application developers means Facebook doesn't have to take the heat for privacy. If third-party developers can create apps that change the way people see your profile -- or apps that change the way you see others' profiles -- then the onus is no longer on Facebook to think up every conceivable privacy snafu and try to defend against it. Facebook is being used in so many ways, and by so many people, that it can't possibly invent customizable privacy features that fit every use-case. They need to let third parties develop apps that do this.