By Jonathan Frewin Technology reporter, BBC News Facebook has come under increased scrutiny over its privacy policies

The controversy over Facebook's privacy policy is helping those developing alternatives to the social network.

Funding and users are flowing to services that claim to put members in charge of their personal data.

The rivals range from start-ups to more established firms working on the specifications for an ecosystem of open social networks.

Experts say Facebook may have little to worry about, despite 11,000 people pledging to quit Facebook on 31 May.

"Nobody has reached anything like critical mass in the same social platform area," said Lee Bryant, from social technology consultancy Headshift.

"Facebook is like an entire web operating system," he said.

Old rivals

There are already many well-established alternatives to Facebook.

Fans of the microblogging service Twitter might argue that it is poised to steal the site's crown. It entered the world's top 100 websites only last year, and is now sitting around tenth position globally, according to Alexa, a web information company.

But Twitter is more a micro-blogging site than a social network, where friends follow each other's daily activities by default.

Alongside are a whole host of other early high profile innovators in social networking.

But many, including Bebo, Friendster and Myspace have seen their popularity decline in the last 24 months. None of these are still in Alexa's global top 20.

The Diaspora team hopes to change social networking Young upstarts

The latest round of privacy issues with Facebook has provoked considerable interest in some more embryonic social network projects.

Mr Bryant said: "Many people are looking to Diaspora as a new model - something which is standards-based, open-source and distributed."

Diaspora was founded in early May year by four New York University students who aim to create "the privacy aware, personally controlled, do-it-all distributed open-source social network".

It also caught the eye of investors on the Kickstarter website, which aims to find funding for creative projects. In just a few weeks, the Diaspora team has received pledges of $175,000 (£122,000). They started out asking for just $10,000.

Max Salzberg, one of the founders, told BBC News: "Facebook is not what we are going after.

"We are going after the idea there are all these centralised services where people are giving up their personal information. We want to put users back in control of what they share."

But Diaspora's software is still in the early stages of development, and it's not yet clear exactly where the project might go.

Another fledgling social network is OneSocialWeb that has the backing of mobile giant Vodafone.

Its designer, Alard Weisscher, told BBC News "We believe social networking is becoming so important ... that users should have the right to choose their provider, be able to switch between providers ... whilst owning and being in full control of their data."

Common standards

Mr Weisscher said that rather than try to create a new social network, the OneSocialWeb team is trying to define a common language, called protocols, for communication between social networks.

This is an idea common to many such projects.

Continue reading the main story

I compare it to the 1990's, when AOL and CompuServe were both very popular, but were 'walled gardens'

Michael Chisari Appleseed founder

Michael Chisari founded Appleseed in 2004, to try and build a simple social network. The question he pondered at the time was "If two sites were running my software, why couldn't they interact?"

Like Diaspora, Appleseed's approach is one of a growing band of "distributed social networking" projects, where anybody can set up a social network, and the different systems should be able to interact with each other.

Mr Chisari said: "I compare it to the 1990's, when AOL and CompuServe (early Internet Service Providers) were both very popular, but were 'walled gardens'".

"Users on AOL could only e-mail other AOL users, same with CompuServe. Then, e-mail started getting popular and some people switched, but it forced people to ask why they were being walled off," he said.

Mr Chisari pointed out that both AOL and Compuserve "were forced to open up ... so that their users could participate with the rest of the world."

Both companies have since faded considerably, and Mr Bryant at Headshift thinks something similar might happen at Facebook: "It's a real and present danger. What people are looking for as a sign of that is a flocking behaviour.

"It was a flocking behaviour that built Facebook, and it's a flock of people saying they're going to a different social network that could lead to its decline."

Competing standards

So can the new social networks establish a set of standards that they all stick to?

Mr Bryant said it is a sensible goal in the long term. "But over the short term, it will be a real battle."

The founder of Appleseed has discussed universal standards with OneSocialWeb, because the software he developed has some similarities to their social networking language.

But well-funded Diaspora has indicated that it might use its cash pile to implement a different set of open standards called OStatus.

Those are being developed in part by yet another potential rival to Facebook.

That company is called StatusNet, which itself has created social networking software in use by 25,000 sites, with more than 1.5 million user accounts, according to Evan Prodromou, the company's head.

"Any StatusNet site lets people from other (OStatus standards-compliant) sites follow the users there", he said.

"The open protocols that we use mean our software works with much higher-profile services, like Google Buzz, Posterous, LiveJournal, WordPress, and Tumblr."

Is there any chance that Facebook might sign up to such an open model as well, just as AOL and Compuserve did with E-mail?

Mr Bryant from Headshift thinks not: "The valuations we've seen for rounds of investment in Facebook mean they have to focus on making money soon.

"If they go down the open standards route, they would lose much of the lock-in that gives them value," he said.

Closed meeting

And any such move would also assume that a common, open language can be established in the first place.

According to Mr Prodromou from StatusNet, a "federated social web summit" is planned in July to try and build momentum for one around OStatus standards.

However, he said, it would be "invite-only".

Teenage social media butterflies may not be such a bad idea

Kids most likely to spend a lot of time texting and on Facebook, among other networking sites, may be more well-adjusted, studies suggest.

Related

Chart: Kids' computer, cell phone usage

The many ways to share bad news

Booster Shots blog: Recent news from the health world

By Melissa Healy, Los Angeles Times

May 18, 2010

• 

  E-mail

• 

  Print

• Share
• 

  

  Text Size

la-sci-socially-connected-kids-20100518

With his gaze fixed on a tiny screen, hearing plugged by earbuds and fingers flying, the average teenager may look like a disaster in the making: socially stunted, terminally distracted and looking for trouble. But look beyond the dizzying array of beeping, buzzing devices and the incessant multitasking, say psychologists, and today's digital kids may not be such a disaster after all.

Far from hampering adolescents' social skills or putting them in harm's way, as many parents have feared, electronics appear to be the path by which children today develop emotional bonds, their own identities, and an ability to communicate and work with others.

In fact, children most likely to spend lots of time on social media sites are not the least well-adjusted but the healthiest psychologically, suggests an early, but accumulating, body of research.

In one new study, 13- and 14-year-olds were found to interact on social network sites such as Facebook and MySpace simply in ways that were consistent with their offline relationships and patterns of behavior. And of the 86% of children who used social media sites (a number that reflects the national average), participants who were better adjusted in their early teens were more likely to use social media in their early 20s, regardless of their age, gender, ethnicity or their parents' income.

» Don't miss a thing. Get breaking news alerts delivered to your inbox.

Adolescents are largely using social networking sites to keep in touch with friends they already know, not to converse with strangers, said the author of that research, University of Virginia psychologist Amori Yee Mikami.

"So parents of well-adjusted teens may have little to worry about regarding the way their children behave when using social media," Mikami added. "It's likely to be similarly positive behavior."

Megan Mills, a Los Angeles eighth-grader, and her mother would agree. Megan cut her digital teeth on the 'tween social networking site Club Penguin.

Now 14, she has graduated to a Facebook account. She counts her mom among her many "friends" — a status that gives Donna Schwartz Mills access to her daughter's ongoing electronic chatter and a condition that Mills laid down before allowing her daughter's foray into teen social networking.

Mills, 54 and herself a blogger, says she's seen little to fret about — and much to cheer — on her periodic visits to her daughter's Facebook page. The teen, who has scaled back a once all-consuming commitment to gymnastics, keeps in touch with friends and coaches from that phase of her life, as well as with current friends that Mills knows well.

"People are always worried about the Internet making it easier for strangers to hurt your children," Mills says. But she points out, "The dangers are the old dangers of who they hang out with."

In studies of teenagers and young adults, Cal State L.A. psychology professor Kaveri Subrahmanyam has also found that children's online worlds and friendships strongly resemble their relationships offline, with overlapping casts of characters and similar hierarchies of closeness.

"I think the majority of kids use it in ways that don't jeopardize their well-being," she said.

Ultimately, it seems, the digital world is simply a new and perhaps more multidimensional place to conduct the age-old work of adolescence — forming identities separate from those of parents.

Every waking hour

Just how outsized is digital media's presence in a child's life? In January, the Kaiser Family Foundation reported that for more than 7 1/2 hours a day, American children ages 8 to 18 are tethered to computers, plugged into MP3 players, watching TV or playing video, computer or handheld games — and for much of that time, doing several at once.

Add to that tally time spent texting by cellphone — an activity the Kaiser study did not include — and for most children, the daily log of media immersion would surpass time spent sleeping. A report by the Pew Research Center released in April found that 72% of U.S. teens text-message regularly, a third of them more than 100 times a day. As a means of keeping up with friends daily, teens are more likely to text than to talk by phone, by e-mail or face to face.

But a recent study in the journal Developmental Psychology underscores the point that it is largely the child, not the technology or even the time a kid spends using it, that seems to influence how safely he or she will navigate the digital world.

Certainly there are dangers online, says Subrahmanyam, also the associate director of the Children's Digital Media Center in Los Angeles. But the new media "is ultimately a tool" for children, she says. Most will use it constructively.

Those teens who struggle with depression or with aggressive or delinquent behavior are more likely to find the online world to be full of digital landmines. Mikami's research found that they were more likely to harass, bully and take online risks such as "sexting" or "MIRLing" (text-speak for "meeting in real life" a stranger one has chatted with online), or to be vulnerable to others who harass, bully and coerce.

In the end, says Mikami, these risk-takers were more likely than healthier children to abandon public social media sites such as Facebook and MySpace for online scenes such as chat rooms, where their behavior is less subject to scrutiny.

Parental worries

All of this research comes on the heels of two task force reports that combed the evidence on children and their online world and found that, on balance, that world is far less frightening than many parents believe.

A three-year Digital Youth Project, undertaken by researchers from schools including USC and UC Berkeley, urged adults to "facilitate young people's engagement with digital media" rather than block it, begrudge it or fear it.

"The digital world is creating new opportunities for youth to grapple with social norms, to explore interests, develop technical skills and experiment with new forms of self expression," the group's 2008 white paper concluded.

The second task force, commissioned by state attorneys general to gauge the dangers that children face in socializing online, found last year that children are far more likely to be bullied or sexually propositioned by peers they know than they are to be preyed upon by a stranger on the Internet.

That report, drafted by Harvard University's Berkman Center for Internet and Society, concluded that on social networking sites such as MySpace and Facebook and Friendster, strangers — let alone strangers seeking sex — are routinely locked out and readily rebuffed. Where children do stray into dangerous territory with strangers, it is generally knowingly, in chat rooms and online forums intended for adults.

It follows from these findings that the proliferation of digital media hasn't changed the definition of good parenting much either: "The whole thing is knowing your own child," says Cornell University researcher Sahara Byrne, who studies the factors that make children more or less amenable to parental limits on their media use.

Her research has found that children who think they can go to a parent with a problem — any problem — are more willing to accept parental limits on their media use and appear to be less likely to seek out trouble online. That belief, added Byrne, was a more powerful predictor of a child's healthy Internet use than a family's income, education, church attendance or political leaning.

And although she often has to "calm parents down" when she speaks to groups of adults about their children's digital lives, ultimately, she's found, they come around.

Whether their adolescent selves talked to friends on the phone for hours, hung out and flirted at a neighborhood meeting spot or made mix-tapes to play at parties, Byrne says, most parents can see that "many of the things their kids are doing are kind of like what we did."

melissa.healy@latimes.com

Copyright © 2010, The Los Angeles Times

• 

  E-mail

• 

  Print

Digg

Twitter

Facebook

Read This Later

  Share

Comments (5)

Add / View comments

Navydad at 4:22 PM May 18, 2010

The article references reports based on a number of long term studies. Comments like "I completely disagree with this article" or "How could this article be true?" are worthless unless backed up with some evidence.

I'm a psychologist with two kids and I have worked with college students for the past 29 years. The conclusions reported in this article are consistent with my own observations. Social networking technology can be used well or misused. I know middle aged adults who do dumb and risky things online that my 15 year old daughter would never do, precisely because she is familiar with the technology and its risks, and she is a smart and sensible young person. These technologies are not going away, so it behooves all of us parents to help our kids navigate the online social world safely, just as we help them learn to drive safely.

Anemic-Royalty at 2:50 PM May 18, 2010

     5.  Some children/teens are very shy in real life. Developing an online persona can help them   gain the confidence to break their shyness and start forming relationships with their peers online  and eventually in real life. 

     6.  Believe or not, but you can learn alot from the internet. I believe teens who use the internet and browse the web everyday, are generally less ignorant and more worldly then teens who do not.

     7.  internet usage can improve your spelling. Believe me, If you post a youtube comment full of misspellings, the grammar&spelling nazi's will let you know.

     8.  I may be biased given that I am 17 and use the internet daily, but i have a feeling that the comments below are biased as-well(no offence intended). So perhaps open your mind and give your kids and the internet another chance. I will now get off my soapbox and stop ranting/spamming.

Anemic-Royalty at 2:47 PM May 18, 2010

1. I completely disagree with the comments below. The whole point of myspace and facebook is to add your actual FRIENDS, not people who you "compete" with. If you find yourself becoming depressed and humiliated on facebook, then you probably aren't using it right or more likely, didn't add true friends.


2. Texting is still a healthy form of communication. I can understand that yes, it does remove the element of body language/facial expression (with exception of the expressive emoticons provided *sarcasm*) however, its better then no communication.


3. A law was passed in most of the US that prohibits texting while driving. So that element is not a huge problem.


4. Im running out of characters so i will fnish my rant after i post this.

Discussion FAQ

Find More Stories

18 May 2010

Poisoned bait

Be first to comment

Mark Pesce

Every Tuesday morning I send out a message over Twitter: "Off to my regular in Potts Point. Back in a few hours. Play nice!" For the 6,600 people who follow me it's a tip of the hat and a wave of the hand before I go (somewhat) offline.

For others, though, it could be an invitation to come and play in my now-empty flat. It isn't hard, with a few Google searches, to learn my Sydney address, even my telephone number. It's information that's escaped into the wild, copied and recopied until it evades all attempts to bring it under control. (Some say information wants to be free. I say it simply wants to be copied. That's right - information is horny.)

The more information someone has about you, the more they can put that information to work - for good or ill. Your doctor may want to know a lot about your diet and exercise habits to help you lower your cholesterol or blood pressure. Someone less well-intentioned might use that same information to know exactly when you're most likely to be tempted by a coupon for a tasty cake or an extra-large serve of chips. We are creatures of habit, of weakness, of neurosis, and each of these presents an opening to attack. Throughout history we've been protected by our obscurity; the vast majority of individuals simply aren't notable enough to have their habits, weaknesses or neuroses widely known. This used to be a reason why people hired private detectives. No more. Anyone with a web browser can know more about you than all but your very closest friends and family.

In a shocking example of how this plays out in the real world, last week Sydney teenager Nona Belomesoff was lured to her own death using information gleaned from her Facebook profile, and a connection made through that profile. Miss Belomesoff was approached by a person purporting to represent an animal welfare group, prospectively offering her a position - if she were willing to join him on an expedition to rescue some injured animals. That expedition ended with Miss Belomesoff's body lying in a creek bed.

When someone tries to get us to reveal our financial information online - through a faked website, or an email purporting to offer us a big cash prize for our bank details - we call that 'phishing'. This is a new thing, 'human phishing', where the details shared on a social profile have been used to hone an attack on a person. Miss Belomesoff loved animals, taking an animal studies course at TAFE, and likely shared this information on her profile and through her network of friends. Recent privacy changes in Facebook make it very difficult to hide your likes and interests.

Facebook believes that this makes it easier to find others who share your interests, and does. But it also opens a door that lets every con man and every sociopath ride the royal road into your trust. We implicitly trust those whose interests align with our own, it's a natural affinity which is equally endearing and dangerous. Someone could approach any of us, professing a similar set of interests, and glide right past any of the sensible safeguards which would have us thinking, "Hey, just a minute…!"

Just as we receive emails from Nigerian '419' scammers, promising us millions of dollars in uncollected wills/lottery winnings/resource revenues should we only provide a few simple details, we can now expect a new era of attacks, carefully designed to pierce our cynical armor, infecting us where we are least defended. This is the shadow side of the sharing explosion we're all participating in. The danger of the future isn't that someone will find those snaps of you doing jello shots off an exotic dancer's tummy during that trip to Las Vegas. The danger is that someone will approach you, with a friendly handshake and knowing grin, someone in simpatico with you, until, the damage done, he vanishes. That's what happened to Nona Belomesoff.

What can we do? Social networks are too powerful and too useful to withdraw from them. Instead, we must turn that power inward, on itself. When someone approaches you to make contact, take a good look at their own social network. If they don't have a social network, turn and run. If they do, look at where their network intersects with yours. Again, if it doesn't intersect at all, turn and run. If the intersection is small, regard them with some suspicion - and do your homework. If the intersection is larger, then use your network: ask questions about this person. Are they trustworthy? Do they really share your interests? Be innocent as a dove, but smart as a serpent. Learn everything you can. The same capability that scammers and psychopaths use to get close to us can - and must - be put to work to protect us. Otherwise, our social future will look more like a city of the paranoid, than a strong, shared and safe playground.

Mark Pesce is one of the pioneers in Virtual Reality and works as a writer, researcher and teacher.

• Email
• Share
  • x
  • 

    del.icio.us

  • 

    Digg

  • 

    Kwoff

  • 

    StumbleUpon

  • 

    Twitter

  • 

    Facebook

  • 

    Reddit

• Print

Please, if you use Facebook, read this.

From day one, Mark Zuckerberg wanted Facebook to become a social utility. He succeeded. Facebook is now a utility for many. The problem with utilities is that they get regulated.

Yesterday, I ranted about Facebook and “radical transparency.” Lots of people wrote to thank me for saying what I said. And so I looked many of them up. Most were on Facebook. I wrote back to some, asking why they were still on Facebook if they disagreed with where the company was going. The narrative was consistent: they felt as though the needed to be there. For work, for personal reasons, because they got to connect with someone there that they couldn’t connect with elsewhere. Nancy Baym did a phenomenal job of explaining this dynamic in her post on Thursday: “Why, despite myself, I am not leaving Facebook. Yet.”

Every day. I look with admiration and envy on my friends who have left. I’ve also watched sadly as several have returned. And I note above all that very few of my friends, who by nature of our professional connections are probably more attuned to these issues than most, have left. I don’t like supporting Facebook at all. But I do.

And here is why: they provide a platform through which I gain real value. I actually like the people I went to school with. I know that even if I write down all their email addresses, we are not going to stay in touch and recapture the recreated community we’ve built on Facebook. I like my colleagues who work elsewhere, and I know that we have mailing lists and Twitter, but I also know that without Facebook I won’t be in touch with their daily lives as I’ve been these last few years. I like the people I’ve met briefly or hope I’ll meet soon, and I know that Facebook remains our best way to keep in touch without the effort we would probably not take of engaging in sustained one-to-one communication.

The emails that I received privately to my query elicited the same sentiment. People felt they needed to stay put, regardless of what Facebook chose to do. Those working at Facebook should be proud: they’ve truly provided a service that people feel is an essential part of their lives, one that they need more than want. That’s the fundamental nature of a utility. They succeeded at their mission.

Throughout Kirkpatrick’s “The Facebook Effect”, Zuckerberg and his comrades are quoted repeated as believing that Facebook is different because it’s a social utility. This language is precisely what’s used in the “About Facebook” on Facebook’s Press Room page. Facebook never wanted to be a social network site; it wanted to be a social utility. Thus, it shouldn’t surprise anyone that Facebook functions as a utility.

And yet, people continue to be surprised. Partially, this is Facebook’s fault. They know that people want to hear that they have a “choice” and most people don’t think choice when they think utility. Thus, I wasn’t surprised that Elliot Schrage’s fumbling responses in the NYTimes emphasized choice, not utility: “Joining Facebook is a conscious choice by vast numbers of people who have stepped forward deliberately and intentionally to connect and share… If you’re not comfortable sharing, don’t.”

In my post yesterday, I emphasized that what’s at stake with Facebook today is not about privacy or publicity but informed consent and choice. Facebook speaks of itself as a utility while also telling people they have a choice. But there’s a conflict here. We know this conflict deeply in the United States. When it comes to utilities like water, power, sewage, Internet, etc., I am constantly told that I have a choice. But like hell I’d choose Comcast if I had a choice. Still, I subscribe to Comcast. Begrudgingly. Because the “choice” I have is Internet or no Internet.

I hate all of the utilities in my life. Venomous hatred. And because they’re monopolies, they feel no need to make me appreciate them. Cuz they know that I’m not going to give up water, power, sewage, or the Internet out of spite. Nor will most people give up Facebook, regardless of how much they grow to hate them.

Your gut reaction might be to tell me that Facebook is not a utility. You’re wrong. People’s language reflects that people are depending on Facebook just like they depended on the Internet a decade ago. Facebook may not be at the scale of the Internet (or the Internet at the scale of electricity), but that doesn’t mean that it’s not angling to be a utility or quickly becoming one. Don’t forget: we spent how many years being told that the Internet wasn’t a utility, wasn’t a necessity… now we’re spending what kind of money trying to get universal broadband out there without pissing off the monopolistic beasts because we like to pretend that choice and utility can sit easily together. And because we’re afraid to regulate.

And here’s where we get to the meat of why Facebook being a utility matters. Utilities get regulated. Less in the United States than in any other part of the world. Here, we like to pretend that capitalism works with utilities. We like to “de-regulate” utilities to create “choice” while continuing to threaten regulation when the companies appear too monopolistic. It’s the American Nightmare. But generally speaking, it works, and we survive without our choices and without that much regulation. We can argue about whether or not regulation makes things cheaper or more expensive, but we can’t argue about whether or not regulators are involved with utilities: they are always watching them because they matter to the people.

The problem with Facebook is that it’s becoming an international utility, not one neatly situated in the United States. It’s quite popular in Canada and Europe, two regions that LOVE to regulate their utilities. This might start out being about privacy, but, if we’re not careful, regulation is going to go a lot deeper than that. Even in the States, we’ll see regulation, but it won’t look the same as what we see in Europe and Canada. I find James Grimmelmann’s argument that we think about privacy as product safety to be an intriguing frame. I’d expect to see a whole lot more coming down the line in this regards. And Facebook knows it. Why else would they bring in a former Bush regulator to defend its privacy practices?

Thus far, in the world of privacy, when a company oversteps its hand, people flip out, governments threaten regulation, and companies back off. This is not what’s happening with Facebook. Why? Because they know people won’t leave and Facebook doesn’t think that regulators matter. In our public discourse, we keep talking about the former and ignoring the latter. We can talk about alternatives to Facebook until we’re blue in the face and we can point to the handful of people who are leaving as “proof” that Facebook will decline, but that’s because we’re fooling ourselves. If Facebook is a utility – and I strongly believe it is – the handful of people who are building cabins in the woods to get away from the evil utility companies are irrelevant in light of all of the people who will suck up and deal with the utility to live in the city. This is going to come down to regulation, whether we like it or not.

The problem is that we in the tech industry don’t like regulation. Not because we’re evil but because we know that regulation tends to make a mess of things. We like the threat of regulation and we hope that it will keep things at bay without actually requiring stupidity. So somehow, the social norm has been to push as far as possible and then pull back quickly when regulatory threats emerge. Of course, there have been exceptions. And I work for one of them. Two decades ago, Microsoft was as arrogant as they come and they didn’t balk at the threat of regulation. As a result, the company spent years mired in regulatory hell. And being painted as evil. The company still lives with that weight and the guilt wrt they company’s historical hubris is palpable throughout the industry.

I cannot imagine that Facebook wants to be regulated, but I fear that it thinks that it won’t be. There’s cockiness in the air. Personally, I don’t care whether or not Facebook alone gets regulated, but regulation’s impact tends to extend much further than one company. And I worry about what kinds of regulation we’ll see. Don’t get me wrong: I think that regulators will come in with the best of intentions; they often (but not always) do. I just think that what they decide will have unintended consequences that are far more harmful than helpful and this makes me angry at Facebook for playing chicken with them. I’m not a libertarian but I’ve come to respect libertarian fears of government regulation because regulation often does backfire in some of the most frustrating ways. (A few weeks ago, I wrote a letter to be included in the COPPA hearings outlining why the intention behind COPPA was great and the result dreadful.) The difference is that I’m not so against regulation as to not welcome it when people are being screwed. And sadly, I think that we’re getting there. I just wish that Facebook would’ve taken a more responsible path so that we wouldn’t have to deal with what’s coming. And I wish that they’d realize that the people they’re screwing are those who are most vulnerable already, those whose voices they’ll never hear if they don’t make an effort.

When Facebook introduced the News Feed and received a backlash from its users, Zuckerberg’s first blog post was to tell everyone to calm down. When they didn’t, new features were introduced to help them navigate the system. Facebook was willing to talk to its users, to negotiate with them, to make a deal. Perhaps this was because they were all American college students, a population that early Facebook understood. Still, when I saw the backlash emerging this time, I was waiting and watching for an open dialogue to emerge. Instead, we got PR mumblings in the NYTimes telling people they were stupid and blog posts on “Gross National Happiness.” I’m sure that Facebook’s numbers are as high as ever and so they’re convinced that this will blow over, that users will just adjust. I bet they think that this is just American techies screaming up a storm for fun. And while more people are searching to find how to delete their account, most will not. And Facebook rightfully knows that. But what’s next is not about whether or not there’s enough user revolt to make Facebook turn back. There won’t be. What’s next is how this emergent utility gets regulated. Cuz sadly, I doubt that anything else is going to stop them in their tracks. And I think that regulators know that.

Update: I probably should’ve titled this “Facebook is trying to be a utility; utilities get regulated” but I chopped it because that was too long. What’s at stake is not whether or not we can agree that Facebook is a utility, but whether or not regulation will come into play. There’s no doubt that Facebook wants to be a utility, sees itself as a utility. So even if we don’t see them as a utility, the fact that they do matters. As does the fact that some people are using it with that attitude. I’d give up my water company (or Comcast) if a better alternative came along too. When people feel as though they are wedded to something because of its utilitarian value, the company providing it can change but the infrastructure is there for good.  Rather than arguing about the details of what counts as a utility, let’s move past that to think about what it means that regulation is coming.

This entry was posted on Saturday, May 15th, 2010 at 3:46 pm and is filed under facebook, privacy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

danah is back with another great essay. She's unstoppable. Read it.