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The Deal with Facebook and “Your” Data
Let me just start out by saying that I believe that Facebook is nasty and extremely deceptive with respect to the information we and our “friends” give it. But I will continue to use Facebook and leave my so-called privacy settings close to the default. This posting describes why.
The two sentence summary is that I am a willing grant Facebook the right to do various things with data about me in exchange for the services they provide for me. Facebook isn’t free, but the price in data for service is one that I chose to pay.
Who’s in business with whom
Bruce Schneier in a speech at the University of Indiana says it simply enough: We are not Facebook’s customers; we are their product. Their business is to package and sell information about us to their paying customers (marketers). What they offer to us in exchange for that data about us are the services they provide without monetary cost to us. We aren’t paying them money for their services, we are paying them with information which they can sell for actual money.
I am happy with this deal. I enter into it with my eyes open. However, my privacy concerns may be differ from yours. Although I am willing to participate in this deal with Facebook doesn’t mean that you should come to the same conclusion for yourself. I will talk a bit in the end about where I do think that Facebook is “evil”, but all of that has to do with how deceptive they are. I’m fine with what they are doing with data about me and my friends. But I am very unhappy with how they try to lie to me about what they are doing.
Whose data is it anyway?
[First an aside: Yes, I know that “data” is plural, but the section title “whose data are they anyway” just doesn’t work.]
When we say “Bob’s data” we need to distinguish whether we mean “data about Bob” or whether we mean “data that Bob has some ownership rights to.” As a far from perfect analogy consider that Alice has written a book. Bob has purchased a copy of that book. We can perfectly coherently say that Bob owns Alice’s book. We can ask to borrow or purchase that book from Bob by saying to him, “Hey Bob, can I borrow your book?” We could also ask for “Alice’s book” from Bob.
Some languages, unlike English, make a grammatical distinction between alienable and inalienable possession.
I don’t know how speakers of that languages talk about Facebook data. It would be interesting to study. But even those languages cannot automatically make all of the distinctions among the different ownership rights that the modern legal system does.Many kinds of ownership
I will make the distinction I’m after by talking about “data about Bob” or “data Bob owns”. But even here we need to not get mislead by the ordinary language sense of what it means to own something.
Some rights are what are called “non-exclusive”. When I purchase a song from the iTunes music store, I do not have exclusive rights to that song. Apple and others can sell it to other people as well. So if Bob owns data about Alice, Alice may also continue to own that data as well. I’m pointing this out here so that when I say that Facebook legitimately owns data about you, you won’t freak out too much.
There are many ways to breakdown ownership rights in addition to exclusive versus non-exclusive. For example the right to use something may be unbundled from the right to sell that same thing. (A long term lease may be thought of such an unbundling.) When it comes to information, our everyday sense of ownership can be very misleading.
Accepting the deal
So here’s the deal. When we opt to join Facebook, we are granting them some non-exclusive ownership rights about us. Facebook then processes the data that it owns, and sells it for money to their customers (mostly advertisers). Often this is done through Facebook games and applications. We you play a Facebook game or run a Facebook application, information about you and your friends is transferred to the application developer. The application developers pay Facebook for that.
I am largely fine with that.
Why they are evil
I, with a proper understanding of what Facebook is doing with data about me, am a willing participant. But many people who use Facebook have no understanding of the deal that they are entering into. Some of those people have preferred to never join Facebook had they known what was happening. Others who are now panicked about what Facebook may or may not be doing with the data they’ve acquired may actually be happier with this understanding. But the exchange we’ve made of giving information for services was not a matter of informed consent for most people.
Possibly the most egregious deception is in what happens with data about you every time one of your friends takes a quiz or plays a game or gets a Facebook horoscope. Suppose that Alice is reluctant to release data about herself to all but her closest friends. She trusts her friends to keep, say, the pictures that she uploads private. One of her friends is Bob. Bob very much respects Alice’s concern and would never knowingly release some of those photos to a third party without Alice’s permission.
Bob, however, also likes taking the “which mollusk are you quiz”. When he takes that quiz or plays a game or uses pretty much any Facebook app, all the information that he can see (including the photos that his friend Alice has posted for her friends only) is available to the app. Bob may be happy to provide information about him to the app, but what he doesn’t know is that he is providing information about Alice to the app. Facebook is selling information about Alice to the sponsors of that app through Bob’s action. Bob has to read the fine print to know this, and Alice has no say in the matter.
I have made my choice about giving data about me to Facebook, but I know that many of my friends have not done so. Therefore, I never take quizzes or play games. I don’t want my actions to transfer information about my friends to various third parties without their consent.
In short, Facebook’s deceptiveness is evil, not their business model.
Meta-note
I originally wrote this for my other blog, but it turns out that Blogger doesn’t support markdown.
