Hey Facebook…can you give me some privacy?

02Jan08

My Israeli mother-in-law, who is staying at my home right now, was reading Ha’aretz (a left-wing paper in Israel) today and told me about an article on Facebook and the problem blogger Steven Mansour had in getting his profile deleted.

In a posting from this summer entitled 2504 Steps to closing your Facebook account, Steven describes the arduous process he went through to have his profile deleted. By deleted, he means gone, poof!, no longer there, as if he never existed.

Before this could be done, Facebook customer service told him that he had to first eliminate ALL personal information including, but not limited to, incoming and outgoing messages, wall posts, mini-feed stories, friends, and contact information. It took him several hours to do this even though his profile contained minimal information. Only then did Facebook agree to eliminate his profile completely.

This is quite different from de-activating your account which is very easy to do. If you “de-activate,” however, there appears to be no guarantee at all that your personal information (photos, email, interactions, applications) will be deleted from Facebook’s records. As described in its extensive privacy policy (italics added):

“Removed information may persist in backup copies for a reasonable period of time but will not be generally available to members of Facebook.”

The policy makes no mention of personal info being eliminated from Facebook’s own records, only to members of Facebook, and even then, the information is “generally” not available. Generally? What does that mean? Call me scskeptical, but it sounds suspicious.

These privacy issues reminded me of a book I read about 10 years ago, just as the internet was taking off, called New Rules for the New Economy by Kevin Kelly. Kelly discusses the importance of organizations cultivating trust with their publics to succeed (a pretty fundamental principal of PR). One important way this can be done is for firms to “view privacy not as some inconvenient obsession of customers that must be snuck around but more as a way to cultivate a genuine relationship.” For this trust to really take hold, people “need to know who knows about them, and the full details of what they know.” The issue isn’t so much if companies, such as Facebook, have people’s personal information as much as it is whether or not people are clear which personal information organizations have and how it is being used.

Kelly goes further and writes that information is the new currency of the future. In exchange for offering private information, customers could expect to get something in return. For example, a customer could give an ISP complete and unfettered access to what he is browsing in exchange for a free computer. At the end of every month, a privacy statement is offered similar in format to a credit card statement. The individual can see what privacy he has given up and what he can expect in return. It would be very cool if I could use my personal info to obtain things. Right now, it feels like my info is out there, somewhere, being used by companies (and who know who else) to do with it as they will. Having a sense of control over it would be reassuring but then to provide it in exchange for a good or service…now that would be pretty sweet!

Facebook has taken steps to address this issue. It is a member of TRUSTe, an independent, non-profit organization whose mission is to build user’s trust and confidence in the Internet by promoting the use of fair information practices. On December 14, Facebook and TRUSTe announced improvements to make it clearer for users how their information was being made available to friends and networks on Facebook. Steven Mansour has his own reservations about TRUSTe that he posted just before Christmas. Based on its actions, Facebook understands that there is a bit of unease out there about how users’ personal info is being used. The challenge will be to fully earn this trust. It will be interesting to see how Facebook addresses this issue in the future.

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Tags: Facebook, Kevin Kelly, privacy, Steven Mansour