Facebook Social Plugins versus Privacy">Facebook Social Plugins versus Privacy
The hot news is that Facebook’s new social plugins constitute an invasion of privacy. In my opinion, those who make that statement fail to understand the Internet and the inner working of browsers. They are making a fool of themselves and are making a lot of noise about nothing. The real story is hidden beneath the flack.
With Facebook going live today with its new features, I had the chance to really test the privacy issue. To perform this test, I used three computers. One from which I connect to my Facebook account and two machines from which I have never connected to my Facebook account. CNN was the guinea pig for this test, as I usually check the news after I check my email.
Yesterday, I wrote an article on Integration with Facebook, and left did not log out of my Facebook account when I posted the article last night. Consequently, I still had an active Facebook session cookie. How many Facebook users log out of Facebook, when they are finished with a session? I would say that this applies to most users. This applies not only to Facebook, but to StumbleUpon, Delicious, Digg, and the hundreds of other sites on which we have accounts. Lets get real, it is a real pain to log into a social bookmarking, or social news, site every time we want to bookmark or promote a page.
For a test, I clicked the Recommend (Like) button on an news article. As expected, I had an immediate Facebook connection and my mug shot appeared. Before yelling privacy violation, as my Facebook settings are fairly restrictive, I checked the other two machines. No connection, no mug shot, no privacy violation, I am just one of the count.
On machine 2, I selected a different article and clicked the Recommend button. It asked me to login into Facebook or Sign up for Facebook. If I log into Facebook, my mug shot shows up on both the “Facebook” machine, and machine 2, but not on machine 3. Again, it is the Facebook connection that counts.
The first round of tests were done with Firefox as the browser. Using the “Facebook” machine, I opened the Google browser. Since each browser maintains its own cookies, I had no Facebook connection. Once I made the connection, my mug shot appeared. Then I opened Safari as a browser. Again, the browser had no connection and my mug shot did not appear. If I logout of Facebook, I break the connection and my mug shot no longer appears. Yes, you can logout of Facebook. You just need to click Account, and then click Logout. I still don’t see a privacy violation.
The next test required a bit of help from a willing partner. If a friend recommends a news story and I have a Facebook connection, I do see their mug shot. In my opinion this is no different than seeing everything they share to their friends, which includes the output from all the Facebook applications. If you don’t want to share everything with your friends, change your privacy settings.
It is not a privacy issue with Facebook, and more than it is a privacy issue with StumbleUpon, Delicious, Digg, Google, Yahoo, and all the other social networking sites. If you make something available to the public, it is public. This is the whole reason for sharing.
The real story gets buried in the privacy noise. Facebook is expanding into the territory of other social networks. When you add in the semantic Web features of the community page, Facebook is challenging sites such as StumbleUpon, Delicious, and Digg. They are trying to build an better integrated set of social networking services than either Google or Yahoo. The real question is “can their servers stand the load.”
