Op-Ed Contributors

Coming face to face with Facebook

By Esther Dyson (China Daily)
Updated: 2010-07-02 07:50

Long ago, when Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg was in grade school, I wrote a book in which I lauded something called "P3" (now p3p), the platform for privacy preferences. I was sure that people would start using P3 or something like it to control access to data on themselves. Of course, I was wrong ... for about 10 years.

Now, at last, it's starting to happen - though not exactly the way I envisioned it. Nor is it exactly the way Zuckerberg envisioned it.

While many people are up in arms over Facebook's shifting privacy policies, millions of others are calmly managing their reputations online, using the tools that Facebook and other social websites provide. In fact, Facebook has helped them learn how to do that.

Statistics recently published by the Pew Research Center's Internet & American Life Project indicate that young people manage their reputations online more carefully than do older people. I don't think that means that the young care more about privacy; in fact, I think Zuckerberg is right when he says: "People have really gotten comfortable not only sharing more information and different kinds, but more openly and with more people. That social norm is just something that has evolved over time."

The younger generation is comfortable with sharing precisely because it knows how to control it. Zuckerberg is right that young people don't necessarily want privacy or what analyst Danah Boyd calls "seclusion", but they do want "control". They won't follow defaults blindly. Generally, young people post more information of an edgy nature about themselves and about their friends than do older adults, so they are quick to learn the need for specific controls.

In contrast, older users are less likely to do stupid things in the first place, or to do so in the range of a camera. (Of course, there are notable exceptions.) But they, too, don't want default settings that leave them feeling exposed. They want to "evolve" on their own, rather than be pushed (or led unwittingly) by Facebook.

In short, the market is working, slowly, and consumers are educating themselves, slowly. Facebook has been a big part of that: It has provided the tools to do so, and is constantly tweaking them. It has also publicized those tools, often inadvertently, by setting overly public defaults.

But in its rush to make money, the company seems to have become greedy - and pretty tone-deaf - in its response to critics. The critics may not represent the majority of users, but they deserve a polite and considered response. And when the company does commit blunders - as with Beacon and more recently its plans for user data-sharing with favored vendors such as Pandora - it needs to show more humility.

That's not a moral judgment, but a business one. If the market is working toward a world where users exercise the power to manage their own reputations, it will ultimately punish companies that become too arrogant.