Leaving Facebook is surprisingly difficult:

Facebook’s quiet archiving of information from deactivated accounts has increased concerns about the network’s potential abuse of private data, especially in the wake of its fumbled Beacon advertising feature.

Thanks Sarah.

First, a moment of xen. Err… Zen:

Now with the tone and mood set, turn your attention please to the hardening tone of the conversation around facebook’s beacon.

PCWorld made a play for more attention by re-rolling their previous story, this time focusing on the potential that beacon has for harvesting data from people who don’t even have facebook accounts‽ Fortunately this article points to another good CA blog post, which includes the now-well-traveled blocksite plugin method of defeating beacon.

A fellow who blogs for fortune seems to have gotten just as angry as I did. He goes so far as to predict its demise. I don’t know about that, but he’s definitely right that the story has legs, and none of the reporting is positive. At best it’s guardedly quizzical, at worst it’s cheering on facebook’s demise. Worse still, it’s more than one narrative, each independently bad. Let’s count them. There’s the “this beacon thing isn’t smart advertising” narrative, the “this beacon thing is another privacy trainwreck” narrative, the “facebook is really fumbling this rollout” narrative, the “facebook is suing people in dumb ways unrelated to beacon but at the same time” narrative, and last but not least, the “if beacon is what they can come up with, then facebook is definitely overvalued” narrative. Did I miss any?

The only thing all of this consistently comes back to is hubris. I’m definitely not the only one who thinks that Zuckerberg isn’t a good leader. Perhaps it’s groupthink at facebook HQ?

So here’s a ‘leaving facebook’ PSA: if you want to leave facebook, make sure you delete all your wall posts, remove all applications, leave all groups, remove all friends, and delete all facebook messages. The facebook people won’t do that for you. If you contact their customer support and tell them you want all your data purged, they’ll tell you to log in and delete it yourself. So! You’ve purged your data, right? Now you can go and disable your account. This is an utterly meaningless action, since undoing it is as simple as logging back in. But you did that step too, right? Now you can contact facebook support and tell them you want your account purged. Email them at privacy@facebook.com Believe me, it’s worth it. What comes after facebook will be better.

Moving on, what will life after facebook look like? Well, who are you and why were you using facebook? If you’re lazy, bought into ’social utility’ line, and don’t mind Russian overlords: livejournal. Came for the profiles? MySpace. Used facebook to organize parties? socializr. Facebook didn’t do any of these gracefully. We are the ones we have been waiting for. If the existing tools don’t facilitate social interaction the way we’d like, let’s build them. You’ll pardon me if I focus on details like database storage and encoding issues, I hope. I’ll leave the engineering of new systems to others.

There may be more facebook/beacon news in the near future. I’m calling it quits on talking about it, though. If I haven’t convinced you by now that you should leave, likely I won’t, and putting more energy into this would be a waste.

Did I mention I’m glad I left facebook? NYTimes lays out the evolution of beacon so far, starting:

Facebook keeps tweaking its new Beacon advertising program, which tracks users’ actions on sites other than Facebook.

It has cropped screenshots of the various versions of the popup that beacon has sent to people’s profiles over the course of its short life. The comments after the story are good, too.

PCWorld is running an article saying that facebook’s beacon is more invasive than previously thought:

“The first two cases involve the transmission of user data despite ‘No thanks’ having been selected on the opt-out dialog, and are causes for deep concern. They pale, however, in comparison to the third case, where Facebook was receiving data about my online habits while I was not logged in, and was doing so silently, without even alerting me to the cross-site communication,” [Stefan Berteau, a Computer Associates senior research engineer,] wrote in the research note.

Berteau’s claims directly contradict public statements by facebook representatives, including Chamath Palihapitiya, vice president of product marketing and operations. Berteau’s note can be found here, where it looks like they’ve updated to mention that Facebook now claims that it does not retain or use data receives from logged-out users. Facebook’s short statement can be found here. I’m having trouble understanding how it can be ‘technologically’ necessary for a partner to send data to facebook silently. A slashdot commenter sums it up nicely:

The problem is that Facebook is lying about it, and doing so repeatedly.

1. Zuckerberg led the press and advertisers to believe [nytimes.com] that Beacon would be opt-in (it would publish only with the user’s consent) but launched Beacon as an opt-out feature (it published without the user’s consent).
2. Both the original design [facereviews.com] and the current design [facereviews.com] of Beacon announce to the user that a story is being sent to their profile. They do not present themselves as a choice; they do not ask for consent; they present themselves as a notification that something is already occurring.
3. Even though the new design is “opt-in”, the notification has only one clearly emphasized button: “Okay”. A design that offered a true choice would offer two equally clear buttons (e.g. “Publish” and “Cancel”). Again, the design is crafted to give users the impression that they have no choice.
4. [...]
5. [...]
6. Facebook continues to refuse to let users just turn off Beacon. Instead users have to individually refuse Beacon for each partner site, and they cannot do this in advance; they can only do it at the moment a partner site is about to publish a story on Facebook. Again, they are clearly trying to maintain as many obstacles as possible for users who simply don’t want this information shared.
7. Facebook’s official response [facebook.com] is disingenuous and insulting. The problem is not that Beacon “can be kind of confusing”; it is obviously designed to mislead. Facebook’s Paul Janzer wrote:
   

   While we know “global opt-out” seems like the easiest solution, we believe that if we provide you with full control over your information, you and your friends can get the full benefit of sharing information and connecting on Facebook.

   Of course, if they really wanted to provide users “full control over [their] information” they would let users turn Beacon off.

Facebook doesn’t want you to read an article that paints its head, Zuckerberg, very negatively. From the article-about-the-article:

Facebook Inc. filed two legal motions aiming to force an independent magazine to take down from its Web site documents related to a suit over the social-networking site’s origins.

Early yesterday, Facebook’s lawyers notified 02138, an independent magazine geared at Harvard alumni, of two separate emergency motions seeking the removal of the documents from its online edition.

Ugh. Censorship is damage. Route around it. To that end, a snippet from the article itself:

During their junior year, the twins began sketching out the social network that they hoped would unify Harvard students. The idea came from Narendra, an applied math major from Bayside, N.Y., whom Cameron had met in freshman Spanish class; Narendra and the Winklevosses later lived together in Pforzheimer House. “The three of us were the best of friends,” Tyler would say. “Whenever any of us acted, we all trusted in the other person to act for the betterment of everybody in the group.”

In December 2002, Narendra told the Winklevosses of his vision for an online social network for college students. The Winklevosses liked the idea, and the three decided to bring it to life, naming it Harvard Connection. “It was intended to be a collection of profiles of individuals who wanted to get to know other individuals … at Harvard or abroad or outside of Harvard,” Narenda would say.

They would have to build a website, but none of the budding entrepreneurs had enough coding experience to do so. They needed programmers—which meant that they would have to share their ideas with outsiders. By November 2003, Narendra and the Winklevosses were ready to get Harvard Connection off the ground. The three friends, now seniors, had mapped out much of the site’s design and discussed how to attract users and advertisers. Their programmers—Sanjay Mavinkurve, Joe Jackson, and Victor Gao—had already made progress on a large chunk of the coding: front-end pages, the registration system, a database, and back-end coding. “All three of us were fairly excited about … the idea,” Narendra said.

[...]

The group planned to establish the network at Harvard, then expand to other schools. But first they had to finish the “connect” portion of the site. Gao, a senior in Mather House, had opted not to become a full partner in the venture. Instead, he asked to be compensated for hours worked and was paid about $400. The team sought an ace replacement to finish the job.

[...]

Zuckerberg was an easy choice. Then a sophomore computer science concentrator, he had recently gained campus notoriety by creating a website called “facemash” that flashed photos of two Harvard students side-by-side and asked users to click on the one they considered more attractive. To get the photos, Zuckerberg had hacked into school servers and copied pictures from house directories, informally known as facebooks.

See where this is going? Clearly I can’t pass judgement on the merits of the ConnectU vs. Facebook suit. This is at a shady intersection of IP and Contract law, and I’m sure nobody will look rosy and innocent once all the ink dries. Still, there’s enough in the article to convince you that Zuckerberg is definitely neither rosy nor innocent. If there wasn’t enough in the article, there sure is enough now that Facebook have deployed their lawyers against the site that published it.

I’m even more glad I left.

via.

On the third try I was finally able to deactivate my account.

In the real world, we don’t articulate our social networks. Imagine how creepy it would be to wander into a co-worker’s cubicle and discover the wall covered with tiny photos of everyone in the office, ranked by “friend” and “foe,” with the top eight friends elevated to a small shrine decorated with Post-It roses and hearts.

Says Cory Doctorow. Boyd’s law states that “Adding more users to a social network increases the probability that it will put you in an awkward social circumstance.” Reading the article has convinced me that I don’t need to wait until I can pull all ‘important’ contact info from facebook. I need to dump facebook and not worry whose contact info I lose. If people care about me, they’ll find me, and it’ll be less awkward than being friended on facebook. Goodbye, facebook, and thanks for the good times!

Facebook has apparently backpedaled on beacon. Beacon will not publish to your feed without explicit permission the first time any vendor tries to publish. At that time you can choose whether to block that vendor, prompt every time, or allow the vendor to publish every time. The most important bit is that apparently it will never be possible for somebody who has taken no initial, pro-active step to have something published to their feed by a vendor.

While this isn’t perfect, It’s much closer to what I think most people who objected to beacon would have wanted, including me. I think I might even be able to live with the feature… but I feel burned by the way this was rolled out and the way the fallout was handled. Eg. this NYTimes quote:

“Whenever we innovate and create great new experiences and new features, if they are not well understood at the outset, one thing we need to do is give people an opportunity to interact with them,” said Chamath Palihapitiya, a vice president at Facebook. “After a while, they fall in love with them.”

What got under my skin there was the ‘not well understood’ bit. I got angry enough that I searched for Mr.  Palihapitiya on facebook and sent him a[n angry] note. I didn’t expect a response. Surprise! I got one:

hi cristobal. its unfortunate that you are deciding to leave facebook. i hope that you change your mind in light of the recent changes we have made to beacon. we are sorry if the original implementation was confusing or violated your expectations – that wasn’t our intent. our goal was to give you more information that you could choose to share with your friends. while the first implementation clearly wasn’t ideal, we will learn from this and it will help our future products get better. separately, as we continue to get feedback on beacon itself, we will continue to optimize this experience as well.

thanks for listening and i hope you do reconsider leaving facebook.

thanks,
chamath

While this does make me feel significantly better,  it shouldn’t have taken 50 thousand users signing up for a protest group to get there. It should not have taken any pressure, especially after the newsfeeds fiasco of a year ago. With that rollout, privacy controls were put in place to placate in excess of 90 thousand angry users, and I vividly remember the “Calm Down. Breathe. We hear you.” message from Zuckerberg. So condescending!

Did they not learn from the newsfeeds fiasco? Why can’t they do phased rollouts? Why can’t they make new features voluntary as they roll them out? Why are they so condescending? Zuckmeister: I know you went to Harvard, but jeez! You might actually be smarter, faster, and more attractive than every single person using your site, but if we think that you genuinely feel that way… maybe you’ll make more money? Is that it? Did you make the targeted decision to be the bad guy, cause a stink because you knew it would get you press? Even if you lost all 55,000 members of the protest group, you’d get so much exposure in the news and you’ll pick up that many new freshmen next year anyway? Is that it? That’d be even more disgusting.

Newsfeeds annoyed me, but by the time I logged in and saw what was going on there were already privacy controls. This, though… this is the second time. I’m not waiting for a third. I’ve already eviscerated my profile, and as soon as I manage to dump contact info from facebook I’ll be gone. I’ve already signed up on socializr and I’ll be looking at other tools, too. I’m dumping facebook.

I haven’t actually registered yet, but I’m reading the STOS for socializr and I think I will:

PHOTO GUIDELINES. When you set up a free Socializr account, you will have the opportunity to post photographs of yourself. These photographs should be of you and should be as awesome as possible. We will accept photographs which show yourself plus another adult person (spouse, family member, etc.) and/or your children. Your face should be clearly visible in the photo, unless you are extremely ugly and prefer to wear a paper bag over your head. We will also accept a graphic containing a logo, provided that you are the copyright owner. Photographs may not contain images of children (anyone under the age of 13) alone, cartoons, comics, celebrities, nudity, artwork, obscene or otherwise inappropriate images (as determined in Socializr’s sole discretion). Photographs containing only animals are silly, but if you want to annoy your friends by showing up as a picture of an animal on event guest lists, go for it. For security and privacy reasons, you should not upload any photographs that contain contact information such as names, phone numbers, email addresses, or web site URLs. All photographs submitted to Socializr are subject to review and, if deemed by Socializr to violate this STOS, removal. Offensive content is not permitted in any form. By posting a photograph you warrant and represent that you own all right, title and interest to that photograph and to all images and likenesses contained in that photograph and you authorize Socializr to distribute that photograph as part of the Socializr Service. If you see any photographs on Socializr that do not conform to this policy, please notify us by emailing us at abuse@socializr.com.

I think I may have found my facebook replacement. For now, anyway.

On Thu, Nov 29, 2007 at 12:12:13PM -0800, Facebook Support wrote:
> Hi Cristóbal,
>
> Your feedback has made it clear that Beacon can be kind of confusing.

Thanks for NOT reading my email at all. That's great. A condescending
form letter makes me feel so much better.

What I asked for was a way to opt out of beacon entirely. It's not
fair to force users to opt out for each individual 'partner'. In fact,
it's abusive.

Give us a way to turn beacon off!

Cheers,
--
Cristóbal Palmer