Facebook has value, but no matter what your privacy settings are set to, no matter what you delete, always assume that anything you write or do on Facebook - in any context - will be embarrassingly public. 1) Because it will and 2) because it just makes life easier.
When my wife and I were first dating, for religious and cultural reasons her parents didn't know. Her parents are conservative Muslims and mine conservative Christians. She had a picture of the two of us as her profile picture, and it was set to private (that existed once). More importantly in the picture she wasn't wearing the hijab (the head scarf).
One day Facebook removed the ability to have private profile pictures - automatically converting every profile picture to public. Her sister saw the picture and long story short that was the last time she talked to her parents. That was 2+ years ago. Facebook can't be blamed for the cultural and relationship issues at play here, but they can be blamed for how they went about this. And we can be blamed for trusting them.
I still use facebook. I don't blame them for trying new things, pushing the boundaries, etc. I have however learned that no matter what that data isn't mine. It's facebooks. And whenever facebook decides to innovate they will do whatever they want with their data to try doing it.
This is the pragmatic view to take as a user. However, I don't think it's how we want sites to operate. Facebook's ToS state:
For content that is covered by intellectual property rights, like photos and videos (IP content), you specifically give us the following permission, subject to your privacy and application settings: you grant us a non-exclusive, transferable, sub-licensable, royalty-free, worldwide license to use any IP content that you post on or in connection with Facebook (IP License). This IP License ends when you delete your IP content or your account unless your content has been shared with others, and they have not deleted it.
I think this violates the grant that the user is giving Facebook. If they deleted the content, it's supposed to be gone - Facebook no longer has a license to display it on their site. Facebook has, in public communications, stated that the qualification there is about their messages where you could send effectively an email to another person and both sides have to delete the message - just like with email.
As human beings, we should do a lot of things for pragmatic purposes. That doesn't make it good. In a certain way, it's like knowing that you live in a neighborhood with a criminal and "well, I guess it's my fault that I didn't lock my door or even bothered to go out of the house."
I'm all for Facebook changing to try and do new things, but sometimes there's a lack of consent that's disturbing given that Facebook has been telling users to expect control over their sharing. We've seen articles about the ability for third parties to add you to a group and for that adding to be advertized to your friends. I understand that we should consider anything we post to Facebook public. However, Facebook has strongly encouraged us to put things we don't want public on Facebook with an assurance of privacy. As such, I don't think it's unreasonable to rake Facebook over the coals over this (if it's true). It's the type of bad behavior that should be admonished.
I'm certainly not arguing that companies need to do what their users want or anything like that. However, we call out bad companies as bad. In this case, it looks like they're even violating their own ToS (if the story is true). If Facebook had started out like Tumblr or Twitter or Geocities where you're really trying to post public content, it would be one thing. Facebook didn't start out that way and, in fact, encouraged us to think of them as protecting private content. Let's say Google decided to sell or publicly display your email tomorrow. We'd admonish that. It's a violation without your permission. Is the reason we should consider things posted to Facebook as public that we've seen Facebook be scummy for years now and should have learned that their promises are nonsense?
I don't think you're wrong or anything. I just think that "buyer beware" or "well, you shouldn't have rented an apartment in that neighborhood" are great ways to look at it.
* P.S. Nothing in this comment is meant to cast judgement on whether or not Facebook is doing the things the article accuses them of. I haven't researched it. It's simply to note that Facebook portrays itself as both 1. not sharing your content further than you allow and 2. allowing you to remove content other than things like messages which might be in someone else's inbox. If they're violating that, they're violating what they're telling users.
"...unless your content has been shared with others, AND [not 'or'] they have not deleted it."
But wait. What if another person's privacy settings preclude one's ability to know if people have shared my content or not, and/or whether those people deleted it?
Doesn't that place Facebook in a realm of ultimate deniability with respect to whether or not they are still in lawful possession of this implicit IP License?
Case in point:
1. I upload a scandalous and controversial image, accidentally.
2. I have a friend, who can see the album that contains the
image. [thus it is "shared"]
3. This "friend" immediately shares it. [satisfying the
requisite logical AND whereby it is simultaneously both
shared and not yet deleted by them]
4. The friend UNFRIENDS me (OH NOES!), and locks me out of
viewing anything related to their account.
5. I delete the image, believing that I am revoking the
implicit IP License.
6. Unbeknownst to me, Facebook retains an IP License by virtue
of the fact that someone else has not deleted the image.
7. Due to Facebook's policy, they are bound by their own
privacy obligations to the other user, to withhold from me
information regarding WHO still possesses the image, and
will not tell me HOW they are able to claim lawful
possession of an IP License for the image I am trying to
revoke.
8. I am stuck in the very limbo that OP is complaining about,
whereby Facebook claims to have an implicit License to
publish content, but will refuse to disclose the evidence
of who has yet to delete the image, as prove that their own
license is derived by the actions of another.
9. In theory, this other user might very well "forget" their
Facebook password (whoopsie! but innocently, and certainly
not as revenge...) and lock themselves out of their own
account. In this manner Facebook now entitles themselves to
the IP rights of this image in perpetuity, without the
potential for revocation, because thei refuse to unlock the
sharer's account without adequate proof.
So when you "share with others" (whatever that might specifically mean, according to how they've defined their user interface at that particular moment), that very action is potentially bestowing onto Facebook potentially eternal IP rights to distribute that content forever.
Like, simply by virtue of sharing, any person who then accesses the content and then re-shares it and refuses to delete it, is then acting as the de-facto rights holder from which all of Facebook's privileges are derived.
But by letting another Facebook user access your shared content, as a peer, it's not immediately clear where that peer truly derives their eternal permission to forever re-share everything they ever had access to as your friend. Why does that person possess eternal rights to share YOUR content on Facebook, simply by being listed as your friend? Where does that part come from? Isn't that behavior enabled by Facebook? And doesn't Facebook reserve the right to redefine how things are "shared" at will? So then, doesn't that mean that Facebook is enabling itself?
Doesn't it seem like there is strong potential for a conflict of interest between Facebook and the other two parties involved?
> For content that is covered by intellectual property rights, like photos and videos (IP content), you specifically give us the following permission, SUBJECT TO YOUR PRIVACY and application settings: you grant us a non-exclusive, transferable, sub-licensable, royalty-free, worldwide license to use any IP content that you post on or in connection with Facebook (IP License). This IP License ends when you delete your IP content or your account unless your content has been shared with others, and they have not deleted it.
It says that their license to display the image is subject to your privacy settings. Simply setting the image to Only You doesn't remove the image, but would ensure no one can see it. It effectively revokes Facebook's license to show the image to all your friends. If none of your friends can view it, they cannot share it, and it should remove any of their previous shares. Then you can delete it.
EDIT: Come to think of it, I have a feeling that "unless your content has been shared with others" behaves more narrowly in practice than it could by reading the text. Probably, it would apply to edges cases beyond Facebook's reasonable control - like a notification of a picture to a phone. The app only checks for updates every so often, and it may be out of service for a while, but a thumbnail is sent. You could delete the image, but until they check Facebook's servers, the person has effective control over the thumbnail, which is a derivative work of your copyrighted image, legally. Facebook is just covering their bases there.
In my experience, a share is just a reference to the original post/image/whatever. The share may still exist, but I think anyone trying to access it will get an error saying that post doesn't exist, or they do not permission to view it.
You are way too easy on FB for destroying your girlfriend's relationship with her parents. Clearly, FB deserves at least some of the blame.
Without your consent, they made private photos public. You didn't do that. You used their privacy settings which they created to prevent this type of situation. To have FB disregard their own privacy settings is 100% on them.
But, instead of blaming FB, you blame yourself. In light of the total collapse of privacy we've experienced recently, it's really sad that that seems perfectly rational.
I think he's philosophical about it because, let's face it, her parents would have found out sooner or later -- certainly, by the time they got married!
But I agree with you about Facebook. I closed my account three years ago. (Heh -- three weeks later they tried to recruit me. I turned them down.)
On the contrary I think that his view is far more realist than yours. Her girlfrind gave her private picture to a third source. If you want to keep information secret you never give it away, not on internet not on the real life. Is not like facebook went to her homea amd took the pictures from her camera.
I don't think that facebook did a good job here of course. But it's more that it acted like a catalizer in a situation that was heading on tha direction any way.
I voted both you and the predecessor up because you're both right. FB deserves the blame but OP is a more of a realist in his philosophical assignation of "blame."
FB is happy to "destroy privacy" like a child unable to consider the real implications.
> If you want to keep information secret you never give it away, not on internet not on the real life.
How do you apply that seemingly unassailable stance to something like iPhone/iCloud, where photos you take with the only camera you have on you during once-in-a-lifetime-moments are immediately and automatically uploaded to a third party for safekeeping?
The solution to all of this data retention/spying stuff is not "start being meticulously paranoid with all of your data", not the least of which is because that won't scale to the majority of the population (and it must, if we are to retain a free society). Furthermore, communications metadata (such as email envelopes with your residential IP and timestamp, cell tower logs that reveal your location, or call logs that reveal your social graph) can't be kept secret unless you _stop communicating with people_. It's a non-starter.
The solution is to alter the legal environment such that these large troves of centralized data are much harder to exploit for evil, both by service providers and military intelligence organizations.
> How do you apply that seemingly unassailable stance to something like iPhone/iCloud, where photos you take with the only camera you have on you during once-in-a-lifetime-moments are immediately and automatically uploaded to a third party for safekeeping?
I apply it equally. The same goes for VPS, EC2, etc., and (especially given recent revelations) it's clear it should apply even to unencrypted communications over the Internet even between nodes you control.
Do you think if you pay an ISP specifically to not divulge your data to others, and they do, then you should be able to get restitution legally, since they broke the contract?
At what point can you actually have a basis for legal recourse?
Once again the problem is that we don't have decentralized technology that would store our data encrypted and serve it only to those who we have granted access. But we will. Actually the new MegaUpload is encrypted.
I absolutely think that you can and should make contracts that provide for restitution, if possible. It's up to each individual what sort of restitution they would require for leaking certain pieces of their data.
>How do you apply that seemingly unassailable stance to something like iPhone/iCloud
A: if you want to keep it secret. How often do people find themselves in once in a lifetime moments that they want to keep secret, and want to take photos of, but only have an iphone with them?
B: iphones are not the only phones with built in cameras. If you care about privacy to that extent, you wouldn't own one.
That said, I agree with you. One example is when Service providers unilaterally change their tos by asserting that continued usage implies consent. This puts too much power in the hands of companies like Facebook, where many users are too embedded not to continue.
Enough with this "3rd party" bullshit. Just because they are a 3rd party, doesn't mean they can make everything about you public, or hand it over to whoever.
They agreed to keep your stuff private under their settings, and then they just unilaterally decide that it should be public? Screw that. This could be a winnable class action lawsuit.
FB has (disregarded|overridden|conveniently forgotten| changed) their own privacy settings so much at this point why bother. It's a complete sham, a lie, bullshit, etc.
There's really nothing you can do about this state of affairs except quit FB. They know you won't so they'll just keep fucking you. FB doesn't respect you like they don't respect their own ToS. Their job is to fuck you, over and over. That's their business plan and purpose of existence. Your job is to get fucked. Recognize your place in this relationship.
If you're uncomfortable about this relationship then leave. Otherwise STFU. Stop telling me that FB did something terrible with your precious personal information again. It's like someone complaining that their car got stolen after they left the keys sitting on top of it in a bad neighborhood. WTF did you expect?
While true, it's not like this wouldn't have happened eventually anyway. Were they going to keep this relationship secret from her parents forever? How well would that ultimately work out?
> always assume that anything you write or do on Facebook - in any context - will be embarrassingly public.
Furthermore, even if you don't use facebook, or use it for reading only, you can always assume that every piece of data your friends give them, from photos with your face in them to the contents of their address book (with your birthday, nickname, private phone numbers, etc) will be stored by them forever.
Even if they don't display the data on the public site, don't think they don't mine it for actionable changes to ad targeting.
It was recently discovered that they were leaking data that they were collecting from people's address books. Turns out that their app was uploading it for friends-matching but they were (logically) storing it silently alongside your profile.
It may well be possible that, via just their mobile app's userbase's contacts, they have the vast majority of the social graph for the entire planet, even their non-users.
Those users have volunteered sufficient data that, given that planetary graph, they can infer many attributes (with high accuracy) associated with those who actively avoid them.
It's sort of the same concept as how facial recognition technology and traffic analysis can uniquely ID all mass transit users, even those who don't use credit cards (your name's in the magstripe) to pay the fare. Given enough data, they can fill in the holes with sufficient accuracy and encompass everyone.
"Facebook has value, but no matter what your privacy settings are set to, no matter what you delete, always assume that anything you write or do on Facebook - in any context - will be embarrassingly public. 1) Because it will and 2) because it just makes life easier."
The problem here is that I do consider everything I do on the Internet to be public, but most average people don't. This is why I don't have a Facebook, which admittedly is probably a big killer for my social life in my age group being a late teenager. People in their late teens/early twenties are reckless when it comes to the Internet and I simply can't risk being associated with any of that.
Even if Facebook hadn't exposed the photo -- would it have hurt in any way? Her parents surely would have noticed at the wedding that you weren't Muslim.
Facebook seems to have been a force for expediting a break through the impasse, in this case.
How about instead of pushing this mindset to everyone using Facebook that "keep using it, just remember nothing is private", we push the mindset of "just delete your Facebook account, it's bad for you" instead?
I'm getting tired of people finding excuses for Facebook like "hey, you should've known it's bad, just don't do that, and then it's fine". How about you stop using it?
FB has, over the years, gradually lost my trust until I deleted my account in November 2010 after having been a member since late 2004 when FB was college-only.
As a 20-something living in SF, it's a daily thing now: I don't get invited to parties, I don't know about birthdays, I don't see my friends' photos, I don't have any contact with anyone from high school or college anymore.
There is a real social cost for someone in my situation to not be on FB. I struggle to quantify the harm, but it's there. I struggle too to explain to my friends why I'm not on FB. And yet I still think I'm better off without it.
The whole situation contributes to the isolation I already experience as an introvert and someone who doesn't much care for bars, clubs, or alcohol -- though I suppose I don't need to remind this audience that being alone != loneliness.
I guess it doesn't matter much anyway, since FB is still collecting information on me (and other 'shadow profiles' of users not on FB).
What kind of friends are they, that don't notice and/or care to invite people except through Facebook?
Also, birthdays? Aren't those the sorts of things you find out about once per friend and then add to your own contacts? I've never had a Facebook account, but that's not a problem I've ever experienced.
Granted, I don't automatically know the birthday of every single person I meet or even get a number/email from. But I would go so far as to call that a feature, and because of that, the birthday notifications I do get are worth getting.
I don't think there's any malicious intent. In my demographic, (almost) all events are set up through FB because your friend graph, mass-invites, and guest lists are built in.
My flatmate's boyfriend is fond of throwing large house parties with hundreds of invitees, then hiring a doorman to check names off against the FB RSVP list. If you're not on it, you're not admitted.
My closest friends remember me and send me invites via email, but I can't fault them for forgetting now and then.
Since killing my account (because they kept resetting my privacy settings to public... bastards) I've outsourced my Facebook Birthday/Party monitoring to my girlfriend.
It's risky to own lots of stock in your employer because you losing your job would be more likely to come at a time when your investments were worth less. It's risky to let your SO handle too much of your social life for similar reasons.
I'm very close to my wife and can't imagine getting a divorce, but I think it's healthy that we manage our own social calendars.
I'm similar to BWStearns, I let my girlfriend monitor facebook for events, we often both get invited to events where only one of us attend or one of us is invited by the other isn't. That's not to say she manages my calendar. We have both our own GCals (viewable by the other) and a shared GCal, we've had a long standing agreement that if we book anything in our own calendar attendance by the other is not expected and our shared calendar is attendance optional unless otherwise specified.
I didn't mean to imply maliciousness -- rather to draw a line between the sorts of friend-of-a-friend-of-an-ex-coworker parties you might miss out on for not being on Facebook, and a party of an actual friend you know and spend time with.
In short: pointing to the line between friends and "friends" and (likely my personality coloring the value judgment) thus questioning whether you're actually missing out by not being so closely connected to those "friends".
(Frankly the very concept of a house party with so many attendees that don't actually know one another, that a door man and a guest list is required, sounds like a caricature of a straw man I might have cooked up to have a laugh at "things you might need FB to get invited to". But maybe that's just saying more about me and why I don't grok or value things like FB.)
I've talked to a few people who were sending out their wedding invitations and were legitimately worried about accidentally missing someone on their Facebook friends list or forgetting about someone who doesn't use Facebook.
It's definitely naive to think "oh, if you're really friends with them you'll remember their name without the help of a computer." This is especially the case with larger more inclusive weddings where now-disconnected friends are invited.
I think its more "if the party is of a certain size you don't notice who isn't there." so for acquaintances, dropping off FB can drop you out of a lot of invites.
That said, I find it challenging to remember my immediate families birthdays (not to mention, anniversaries etc) and while my crutch has always been a calendar, FB can provide that crutch for folks who don't have a calendar habit.
Bottom line is that the core premise of FB is actually quite sound, its just not easily monetizable. Its possible that after a while folks would pay to subscribe to a FB like service but long before that Google or someone else who isn't being held against the wall with a share certificate pointed at their head may find a more workable solution.
And of course FB could, their are a lot of smart folks over there.
This is how I've dealt with FB's negligent, frequent, and non consensual behavior:
1) No one can post on my wall
2) No one can tag me in pictures, post or places.
3) My profile picture excludes my face.
4) I post little to nothing.
5) I only friend a narrow group of people. Being an offline friend of mine for years is not enough.
6) People who make weird comments are unfriended quickly.
7) The list goes on, but it can be summarized as do as little on FB as possible.
My best friends, most of my girlfriends, my family -- I am not friends with on FB!
You can have a FB account and maintain some basic degree of privacy. It probably is not the way Mark Zuckerberg intends it. The more he does to interfere with my usage patterns, the less I use FB (and I hold him ultimately responsible for the UX.) I expect to continue to lose control over my account in the future. The more this occurs, the less I'll use it.
Strangely, over the past year I have begun to really enjoy and understand using Twitter.
The last sentence resonates with me. My twitter account was started in 08 and largely unused until this year. I'm surprised how much I like it after it clicked for me one day. Twitter works (for me) by keeping the number of people I follow low and keeping the signal to noise high.
You sound like me. I have now recently deleted my Facebook account. I recently realised that I was not participating, only lurking, mainly because I no longer trust Facebook with my data (I've spoken previously about soft-deletes archiving versus physical deletes). I also no longer trust the NSA Facebook relationship post-PRISM.
If there are more people like me, then I truly fear for Facebook's long term success. (Disclaimer: I still own Facebook stock).
Sounds like you are a Facebook leech! Community involves active participation!
You just have to learn to ignore some posts - gloss over them.
If you swapped Facebook out for say a private email list - would you be more inclined to participate? And if that is the case - why don't people just use mailing lists?
As a fellow 20-something in SF, I feel your pain. I recently made a FB account that I keep absolutely bare except for my friends to invite me to things. It still results in 'leak' that I'm not fond of, but the alternate choice is to continue to be left in the dust.
What data "leaks" that a moderately sophisticated/equipped adversary could not easily learn via other means? In 45 seconds I was able to learn your name, basic age/location, and email from this post, your hn profile and github profile. Another 45 seconds and I found your google+ and twitter accounts, with better location data, education history and employer.
Anybody who could or would actually harm you with the knowledge can easily acquire it is the GP's point, I think. A Facebook account, ipso facto, adds no additional risk.
Its not what people can know about you, but rather how much of what they know is controlled by you. You can put out there all the info you want to make public, but if you change your mind, facebook will still keep your data.
Everything you mentioned is actually data I've purposely made available, EXCEPT for the twitter account, which continues to vex me. I haven't tried to delete that recently; I'll try again soon. (I can't remember what happened the last time...)
I used to think this, but the truth is more complex. Facebook makes it easy for a lot of people to manage very large number of friends. If you're not using Facebook but most people around you are using it, even though your close friends would probably care enough about you to communicate with you through some other means, you will probably be missing out on a large number of distant acquaintances.
The usual counter-argument to this is that it isn't worth it to care about such relationships anyway, and that you should only be concerned about close friends. It is true that close friends are important, but it might not be true that the optimal strategy is to care only about them. It may be useful to keeping distant connections with old friends in case you ever run into them again, or to have a large distant social circle with diverse backgrounds and physical locations to get more diverse recommendations, opinions, help, etc. More dramatically, say you arrive in a new city where you don't know anyone and no one knows you, but most people use Facebook: if you insist that people that don't initially know you should use your favorite communication medium rather than Facebook to interact with you online, it might be harder to get things started.
This isn't to say that you should use Facebook: I never used it and discourage people from using it. This is to argue that you should be conscious that not using Facebook may come at a personal disadvantage. I personally still think that it is more important to stick to my principles and make an insignificant effort to improve things by not being on Facebook, but I can understand that other people might think differently (though I disapprove their choice).
Not true. You can be really honest to your beliefs and have a miserable life specifically because of that.
I have deleted by FB account twice and then I was spending lots of time explaining why, getting weird looks from people and being left out of comments (e.g. people would post something to FB and be laughing about it later but never explain about what.. really impolite of them but what can I do? engage in more arguments).
So yeah, be honest to your beliefs, just don't expect that will translate to happiness (unless you really work on telling yourself none of that unpleasant situations are really bad). We are human beings, how we interact with others matter (even if I didn't want any of that).
Well for me, sharing my beliefs with friends makes me happy.
If someone does not share or respects my beliefs, then there is no sharing and understanding each other which is the essence of a friendship.
No matter how strange your beliefs are, you will always find people that think similar. The world is very diverse.
It seems that FB even changes the fundamental meaning of a friend. Which is a shame and a lack of social culture.
I had my account around the same times as you did. And deleted for various reasons. When I deleted my account people were up in arms, "Why would you get rid of facebook?" And I am more the type of "why would you want it?" Now I miss out on all sorts of stuff like new babies and marriages, but at least it means really catching up with people when we do get together. Facebook is what I was into when I was growing up on AOL, then it would have been cool. But is it really beneficial to be linked with everyone you have ever met?
On the Saprano's they said something like 'nostalgia is every mans weakness'. In my eyes facebook breads nostalgia, thus I keep away.
I was deleted my account only to recreated it months later due to social pressure (yeah, I'm weak). When I logged back in, FB was suggesting I add all my old friends... I was immediately angry because it seemed FB hadn't really deleted my account so they still had all that data. Then it downed on me that they didn't have to keep my data... all my other friends were sharing so much information about me that I didn't even have to do it. FB knew my college friends, girlfriend, parents, etc..
It is really hard to go off the grid. Does anyone know if I job change, city change plus a name change would help? :)
I've been where you are, it sucks. In fact, I don't really have friends because 1) I have moved around a lot since 2000 and 2) I stopped caring that FB ruled my friendships (in the way you mention). There are definitely people I'd be friends with, if they lived in my city, but since they don't, they only keep in contact via FB, which I don't use socially. I only have it for news feeds from Pages.
Most of my friends are on FB as well whereas I'm not. They almost always tell me when something is going on. Sometimes they forget, but then they apologize.
Try to focus on getting a core group of friends that you maintain regular contact with. Call them, email them, sms them. Use communication forms other than FB to get at them and eventually you'll train them to include you. If not then get some new friends.
Join a table top gaming club. There seems to be a resurgence of table op gaming going on that's really exciting. And it's a great way to meet people.
Growing number of my friends are in FB with fake names and identities. It's more complicated when you add new friends or they want to add you, but otherwise it's ok for keeping touch with close friends.
I'm (real life) friends with a handful of minor celebrities. Most of them have a 'public' profile for PR and every single one of them has a 'private' profile under a pseudonym using generic, non-descript images as their profile pic. It's pretty common.
And when I travel and try to add new people to my friend list, to verify it's me logging in, facebook shows me pictures of food and cats and asks me to identify my friends that have tagged everything but themselves. Plus I'm remembering a hundred fake names, because nobody uses their real name.
I'm the same, I do it too and think it's very neccessary, but it can interfere with FB procedures in funny ways.
But then again, all this isn't new information. I have never really trusted a webpage with relevant stuff. ECHELON is old news, and servers can be hacked. The level of trust some people put into the net amazes me.
In theory it sounds like a good idea, but imagine a scenario where your bank needs to confirm your identity and they outsource this task to a 3rd party that has incorrect data about you (actually happened to me) and when you provide the correct information they tell you it's incorrect and conclude you are not who you say you are. In my particular case they just had old data that was simply inaccurate. Is it unlikely that 3rd party would buy data from Facebook or some entity that obtained the inaccurate data from Facebook? I don't know but I think you see my point. Incorrect data that was inadvertently connected to you could potentially come back to cause you frustration in the future. That said, I don't necessarily disagree with what you're doing and hope Facebook is soon replaced by P2P software.
>Is it unlikely that 3rd party would buy data from Facebook or some entity that obtained the inaccurate data from Facebook?
Probably. Using a fake/altered name is incredibly common on Facebook, especially among younger people. I think any 3rd party assigned with that task would realize that and avoid it.
Oh, I absolutely guarantee it. Your FB search history, other people's FB search history (of your real name and of your fake name), which pages you view in correlation with what e-mail contacts you might have, the schools the people you talk to went to, etc.
Luckily there's no online record of relationship history or it'd be an open and close case.
My name is Scott Renfro, and I’m a software engineer at Facebook working on security and privacy. I thought I'd post the comment I submitted on the original blog post here as well. We’ve put a lot of work into making deletions permanent, so I can imagine how frustrated you must be. I’m pretty sure those story deletions are permanent, and I can’t think of any place where we can or do automatically restore user-deleted content months later.
If you happen to have any more details about specific stories that reappeared, I’d love to try and figure out exactly what happened. Admittedly, that may be difficult now that several months have passed.
As one of the other commenters mentioned, your Activity Log is a better place to get a full list of your activity and delete it item-by-item. It also shows posts that Timeline omits and includes other types of content such as likes and comments. This help page may be useful https://www.facebook.com/help/activitylog and you can find your Activity Log at https://www.facebook.com/me/allactivity?privacy_source=activ...
I couldn’t tell from your description, but one possibility is that you only saw and deleted the stories rendered on your Timeline, which is just a summary of your activity.
As long as you're here, any comment on the (current) top-rated comment by lukejduncan? How can we trust that our private information today won't be similarly exposed by a settings change tomorrow? (I hope that nothing I've posted would endanger my relationship with my family, but I know others aren't as safe.)
I'd like to think we wouldn't need to make such a fundamental change again in the future, but if we did decide it was necessary, I hope that we would give everyone plenty of time to make whatever change to their account was necessary to avoid painful outcomes like that.
Random engineers, even awesome ones like Renfro, don't have anything useful to say about what the SVP of Product is going to decide about how facebook.com will behave.
>We’ve put a lot of work into making deletions permanent, so I can imagine how frustrated you must be
It shouldn't be necessary to put a lot of work. Just delete the content, clobber it with blank fields, or randomized content. It really is very easy.
The problem is that your company's policy is to never truly delete content despite calling it "delete", there are many ways to weasel-word it ("many software subsystems don't truly delete" blah blah) but when someone asks a third party to delete something (s)he doesn't ask for it to have it marked deleted. Just delete it.
Surely not your fault though.
PS: there's no money in this world so that I'd work for a company with the morals and values of Facebook.
When the delete button affects a single row in a single database table, it's indeed really simple. Even if it's a few rows on a single database, you can use transactions. Either way, the deletion succeeds or you surface an error message.
But for a large social site, it starts to become a more interesting distributed systems problem.
Even for a simple story with 4 likes, 12 comments, and likes on several of the comments, the data is sharded across several databases. Simple transactions no longer work. One option is looking for scalable distributed transactions. A more likely option is making sure deletions can be interrupted and restarted without losing state.
Now imagine a public figure whose post has tens of thousands of comments and hundreds of thousands likes. You may not be able to load all of those rows in a single request let alone delete them synchronously. Instead, you have to be able to process the deletion incrementally, reading and deleting some of the data then later picking up where you left off the last time you were interrupted.
Interestingly, the order of these operations can also be important. If you're interrupted between deleting a comment and deleting the likes on that comment, will you still be able to find the likes when you restart?
We've put a lot of work into a deletion framework that deals with these and many other issues. We're hoping to share more details about it in the future.
Well comment tree deletion is a harder operation than post creation or comment creation or liking.
Each of the steps in building up the tree of comments, likes, etc. is a a couple writes at most. If that fails, you're left in a safe state. You tell the user it failed and carry on.
Deleting a post and the comments on it is harder. First, you have a potentially unbounded amount of DB rows to delete across an unknown number of shards. Second, you now have to worry about the order in which you delete things, else you risk being unable to retry in case one of these deletes fails. Third, unlike the inserts and updates, you can't just give up partway, as that's not a safe state to end in.
I deleted my Facebook account a few years ago. The whole deal - waited the requisite month or so to ensure that it was gone, and any further login attempts wouldn't re-instate the account.
Six months later I signed up with a different email address, and Facebook forced me to confirm my account with my phone number. Javascript Error - that phone number is associated with another Facebook account. I click OK, and I'm redirected to my "new" account with all my old Facebook friends (on the opposite side of the country) showing up as "people I may know."
I find rants like this quite interesting, especially when they end with lines like this:
> That is why I may delete my Facebook account. And that is why you should too.
"May". In spite of this pretty egregious behavior/bug, it's still a "may delete my Facebook account". That alone says something about the longevity of the business.
... because everyone is using it. It says nothing about the difference in social utility between the current state of the world and an alternate state of the world in which everyone would be using a federated social network. Facebook is a local optimum from which it will be hard to move away.
I completely agree. However, when my mother wants to locate an old friend from her childhood, my description of a currently non-existent widely-used federated social network is of little use to her, but Facebook seems to serve her quite well.
That alone says something about the longevity of the business.
That and the fact that the people that are leaving are the geeks of the world. Which typically have a lower friend count, lower engagement and fewer connections to the popular 'tastemakers' in society.
Facebook will start to see problems when the popular people leave and drag their social networks with them. But these people are the ones that don't care so much about privacy, security or whether Facebook deletes data now, in the future or not at all.
I think, if you read the rest of his rant, he stopped using Facebook ages ago. He hasn't deleted the account because it makes a negligible difference in terms of how much information Facebook has about him.
There seems to be a philosophical difference in how users versus services view ownership of data and posts like this. If you write status "foo" and someone else comments "bar," who owns what? Do you own the comment because it is subordinate to your post? If your post was just a letter, and someone wrote an essay in a comment underneath it, do you own that essay and can you delete it without permission from its creator?
No, we shouldn't trust facebook. But no, we also shouldn't pretend that the word delete means the same thing on your personal computer as it does on a shared resource like facebook. It's way more complicated than that. It should be simple, but it isn't, at least not yet.
Also, not upvoting this because of the eye-rollingly overdone "merriam-webster defines..." line. God, I can't stand that!
When you send someone a letter, you might have a copy and they will have a copy, but the post shouldn't. If you burn your copy, you don't expect the post to send you a backup.
Another thing to note is that they don't want their users to delete stuff or do any action that may suggest abandoning the platform. I thought that I deleted my profile 1.5 years ago but I tried logging in last week (after seeing a similar HN thread) and was surprised to find that it was all there. It occured to me that I must have deactivated my profile. Then I tried looking for delete option but couldn't find it anywhere. All I could find was a _deactivate_ button. I had to use a third party (Google) to find out about how to delete my profile.
Facebook has made it unnecessarily hard to delete accounts and instead pushes the _deactivate_ option in a very psychologically manipulative way. Even after using the delete option, I'm sure that they're going to retain my data for as long as they like. I still did it for my own sake, prevent myself from using it at all.
Perhaps the way to delete the information in the account is to replace the status posts, comments, photos with junk. Words and sentences that don't mean anything; photos that are noise. Perhaps there's a way to do that in an automated fashion. I'd use that.
You're making me wonder if someone intentionally violates the TOS by, for example, uploading porn if they would delete the account. Facebook does delete accounts that it considers spam so they might just delete such an account.
While I agree with the gist of the argument (Facebook shouldn't bring back user-deleted posts, and you shouldn't trust Facebook), the semantic arguments over the term "delete" are frivolous. It's not unreasonable for Facebook to keep storing things that I delete. Windows has the Recycle Bin, word processors have undo, databases have backups, etc. The problem is restoring the content without the user's permission. Citing a dictionary definition then overfitting your argument to that specific definition is something I expect from a high school speech class.
This is the frustrating thing about facebook. They often have bugs that make things suddenly become public, or settings for visibility of new posts all of a sudden reset to 'all friends' or public. G+ handles this kind of stuff far better.
I really wish there was an auto-delete items older than X months. Most of the value of facebook goes away after a month, anything older than that is usually negative history digging and stalking by others.
Except that this isn't a bug. The user asked for the content to be deleted. For it to become public, they must have used a "delete" flag or something similar. The point is they didn't actually delete the content, rather just flag it as deleted.
Actually deleting content would be a very expensive operation at Facebook's scale. Flagging it as deleted is the most optimal way. What's troubling is that this content somehow got undeleted on its own. Not once, but twice.
Every operation at Facebook scale is expensive. But they have the resources. They don't do something because they don't want to, not because manipulating their data is hard. They do complicated things to their data all the time.
Agreed. I'm not buying the "its hard/expensive" argument that so many people seem to be submitting in this thread.
The fact is, when Facebook gives you the option to "delete" something there is a reasonable expectation that by doing so that post, picture, etc... will be deleted. Removed. Gone. Permanently. If they want to give you the option to retrieve it later in case you accidentally delete something then call it "Flag for deletion" instead.
To do ANYTHING else is disingenuous at best. Otherwise known as a lie.
This is yet more proof that users of Facebook are the product and will be treated as such. Whoever pays Facebook actual money gets to dictate the terms and they are the people that want Facebook to never delete your data.
I wonder if I could get my account really deleted and my data put offline by breaking the terms [1] (posting ads and logos or sharing my password for example).
I'm afraid it would not work, though. Probably they delete the recent content, leave the rest online, and refuse me to log in...
If I hadn't seen exactly the same thing with my own eyes then I would be tempted to believe you.
I said this previously in another Facebook related thread:
Facebook don't properly delete content that you choose to delete.
Photos, check-ins and posts are just archived. I've been through
and deleted everything manually on my timeline back to 2007. I noted
that certain pages still showed the "counts" of content that had long
been deleted:
- http://i.imgur.com/zdwTl.png
- http://i.imgur.com/27RFG.png
Recently I went back to delete some of the newer content. To my surprise, ALL of my previous posts, and comments had returned.
I don't think Facebook are playing fair. Delete means delete, and I want to delete it permanently.
If they archive the data instead of deleting it, then they should say 'archive' on the damn button.
I also no longer trust Facebook at all. I don't post on it, and keep the account only for OAuth testing purposes (and lurking).
If my deleted posts mysteriously appear again I plan on updating every single one to gibberish. Maybe quoting loremgibson.com or 1984.
I've had the same thing happen, so it's true. I wiped my profile clean some years back, yet information slowly returns in phases. I don't know if they do it on purpose and are trying to be as subtle as possible, or if they're somehow unintentionally forgetting deletes. Either way it's annoying to repeatedly delete stuff.
It's a bit extreme to say that it "exists for the sole purpose" of that, since if you look at the post categories, the Facebook-related material only encompasses a small portion of the total posts made.
Regardless of the author's bias towards Facebook, it's possible that they are telling the truth and wall posts that they "deleted" were suddenly made available again due to a flag being unset in the backend or something similar. This is something to keep in mind when creating content on Facebook.
Those are three related posts in a blog with many, many, many more posts. It's chief focus is privacy and your online rights, which extends well into this topic.
Look more before making sweeping generalizations like that, please.
But I'm surprised people think entity like Facebook, Google and any other web businesses delete records permanently. It's not worth it on so many level:
- People that actually want to retrieve their stuff,
- It's harder to implement a full delete than it is to add a flag,
- They would have to give up on data-mining assets.
Flagging items as deleted as opposed to actually deleting them is one thing. Of course it's not ideal for someone who wants to revoke facbook's access to their data, but there is more or less no difference from a user perspective. If I understand correctly, what's going on here is that after the posts and other content were flagged as deleted, they were somehow unflagged and became fully visible again. That's different, and really not okay at all.
Except that a bug implies it was accidental. Everyone deserves the benefit of doubt, but Facebook's history is exceptional in this regard.
Similar to the OP, I have ethical concerns with some aspects of what Facebook does, or at least obvious harmful side effects of what they do. But I think for me the reason they bother me more than Google or others often lumped into the same category is the consistent and, as far as I can tell, completely unabashed disingenuousness they display (e.g., the history of public statements made every time this has happened going back almost to their founding days).
Timeline shows only popular posts you make. If you delete the posts on timeline then only a subset of your posts are deleted AND they will get replaced by other less popular posts you made in the past. You'd need to go into user settings and delete items directly from the activity log. This clearly isn't a huge usecase (1 by 1 item deletion).
This is just another case of user misunderstanding/error which gets blamed on facebook.
I stopped using FB over a year ago, and I deleted my account there last December.
Once you delete your FB account your profile remains visible for another two weeks, provided you don't login during the interim.
Today I can happily say that I am no longer on the publicly-available Facebook site, but who knows if FB maintains an LEO version of the site for use by the fascists (spies) and other government entities...
Every time this sort of articles come up, I feel glad I don't have a Facebook account. As I see it if you care enough about somebody, you have their phone number and their address.
Thats what I was thinking, Im going to go ahead and guess that not too many fb users go through their entire timeline and delete Every.Single.Post. Flagging something like that as hostile and then "restoring" your timeline makes sense. However, I feel like there should be some kind of communication going on in email before something is actually done (for the mass deletes and auto restoring) and a simple "click here if this is what you really wanted to do" would suffice..
In a very creepy aspect of this. I closed my account a while ago, and I opened a dummy one with another email, because I still needed to mod a few communities. The recommendations were the usual: friends of people in the communities and such. About a month ago it started recommending family members, classmates, and friends. Really accurate. It's creepy: I don't have a smartphone from which it could syphon the contacts, I'm not using my real name and I was using an email that I only use for facebook. I have no idea what data it's using. But I was not surprised, I just thought. "Damn it, they found a way"
I always think back to that time when Zuck was on stage a couple of years ago, and he was talking about user-generated content, and he slipped, and referred to it as Facebook's. There you go. Anything you put on their site is their property, to do with as they like. I really think their days are numbered. Not anytime soon, but eventually, they are going to become as obsolete as Friendster, Bebo, and MySpace are now, but first a new social network that is built in that same style must emerge.
I wonder what facebookers who are HNers have to say about this. Do you guys have any opinions about this -- it is by design? Are there ways around it? Will there be ways around this?
There is a social networks for some stuff that you don't want known (for example, sexual fetishes, or gay stuff, or anti-government stuff, and so on).
I know a case where someone (that was never found out who, although there are some suspects) in one of those social networks started to attack some other people there. Until things started to get out of hand, with the person finding the Facebook profiles of those involved (even if they had completely fake profiles) and posting on that network, and then getting their profile in that network and posting back on Facebook...
Then the attacker posted on the niche social network the Facebook profiles of children of the victims, stuff escalated to the point of people hiring private investigators and professional assassins (some of the victims were soldiers and/or military police shock troops, and were not amused at all at threats toward their family... and happily supported plans for a assassination).
Happily the attacker suddenly gave up, and things de-escalated... But it made me much more aware that social networks can be VERY dangerous...
Of course (considering the tone of social networks here, professions of those involved, and that people wanted to do illegal stuff) I cannot explain better or give more information.
Not having facebook makes you look like an anti-social element irrespective of what it does to your mental health and well being. At the end of the day, I feel like make a small circle of friends that engage with you on deep level and not just superficially. What kind of friend it would who couldn't or forgets to text or call you?
That's exactly my feeling on it. Since I left Facebook at the start of 2011, I've seen my friends just as much --- perhaps more --- than when I was on there, and I hear from them at least as frequently. The only difference is that I don't get the occasional, insincere message from people I went to school with who are bored and looking for something to do.
I've had similar issues with Facebook. After it became clear they were using my "likes" and profile information (favorite movies, books, tv shows, etC) to serve me ads I removed every single "like" I had ever done and all information from my profile. Yet I still get targeted adds based on that information.
Thank you. I didn't know that you can actually delete your facebook account until I saw you post. The only option I knew was to deactivate the account. From the UI, I couldn't find any other option, but a single Google point me to the delete account form. Thanks!
I bet when you "delete" something facebook (and many others) just marks it as "hidden" so you will think it is gone.
The same happen to me but with yahoo, I had an old account that was long unused, because I didn't want to lose any contact that could happen I redirected it to another email, then, after a couple of years, I decided to delete the account because only spams were being redirected. A year later I notice that emails started to come from this "deleted" account again and so I tried to login and for my surprise it was active.
So don't expect to "delete" anything, and I think we shouldn't expect to have our rights respected, these companies provide a service that is not really for us.
Supposedly I don't have a Yahoo account, deleted it several years ago. It was very difficult to delete. They make you talk to the fraud/abuse dept, ask you personal questions to prove who you are, ask you over and over again are you absolutely sure, it's a long process. Same with Amazon, it's a long, frustrating process. Then I get an Amazon gift card. To claim the money I signed up for an account (used a different email address) and surprise, surprise, they had all my data saved, old purchases, etc.
This should be illegal and I bet there are some countries that don't tolerate it. Germany?
One thing that has always bothered me it's that if you ever decide to post a comment on a site that uses the Facebook commenting system and you decide not to publish that comment on your timeline, then you have no way of recovering it (and thus deleting it, if you ever decide so). You have to resort to search engines that behave poorly for this kind of things.
I admit that after some mishaps Facebook has greatly improved the privacy controls on the site and allowed user to more easily control what they share and with whom, but I guess pretty much everyone would agree that it's not enough yet. We need the ability to delete the very content that we create, everyone has the right to be forgotten should he decide so.
>everyone has the right to be forgotten should he decide so
This is going to sound like a devil's advocate post, but it isn't. I don't believe that such a right exists.
Why? Because removing all your input from a given medium (a social network, a forum, what have you) destroys context and therefore useful information for other people. Imagine someone who frequented a web forum (say.. Hacker News?) for a number of years, building up a large body of content, helpful posts, etc.
They then, for whatever reason, invoke the EU's "right to be forgotten" (pretending that HN is headquartered in the EU), getting all their posts deleted.
Those posts gone, every single conversation that user was in is now SIGNIFICANTLY harder to follow. What are those thousands of replies in relation to? Who knows? Those conversations are permanently lost to the sands of time.
Putting something out in public should not place any binds on the people who display that information. I believe everyone else's right to learn supersedes the individual's supposed "right to be forgotten".
It's easy enough to fix - don't comment in public if you don't want someone else having those words later.
That said, this isn't to condone Facebook's behavior of "soft-deleting" things that they say are gone. This is downright fraudulent, IMHO.
I spent a fairly large amount of time trying to completely delete my account - it involved emails, 'hidden' links, and multiple confirmation boxes using a nonstandard UI for facebook.
A few days ago I made a brand new account (but using the same email as before) and was greeted with the suggestion to add ALL of my old friends right back again.
Clearly nothing has been deleted, and I now feel confirmed that it never, ever will be.
Just a theory, but could it be that all those friends have your email in their contact list, and when they've done a bulk import Facebook has remembered that connection so it can suggest them to you if you ever join (and vice versa)? The data isn't on your side, it's on there's.
Of course there's a whole other (worthy) debate about that, but it doesn't necessarily mean Facebook didn't delete the data you added.
There is one part of this that I agree with, that is the part where you say that if you delete all items one by one (why don't they have a delete all?) you want them never to be visible for anyone again.
The part I don't agree with is that you expect that the data is physically deleted from the server. I think and expect that big companies don't wipe all your data on command, they simply set a flag for deleted records. Really deleting the data also has a technical impact for them, it probably depends on the company's policy. It would be great if they did wipe all data but I really think most of them don't and have some sort of an aging process or really never delete your data.
Personal story, but nevertheless humiliating and tied to facebook. I was never able to get an explanation or even contact FB's support about it.
Within a matter of hours, I lost over 150 facebook friends. Somehow, it was also tied into instagram and I unfollowed all my friends. Not sure how this happened. But you could imagine that it's embarrassing to have to re-friend people on facebook and explain that you didn't do it on purpose. I'm sure there are some people I forgot to refriend who think that I just de-friended them for personal reasons. This just ties into the fact that whatever happens to you on facebook will be broadcast to your entire social network.
I tend to be more lenient of malice than incompetence. If your goals don’t align with mine, fine, maybe we can still work something out. But if you are in the data-handling business (Facebook, Google etc. are) and you fail to handle data properly, you should rather die today than tomorrow.
Yep. My guess is that when you deactivate, FB marks your posts as deleted to remove them from view, then when you reactivate, it unmarks them, but doesn't make a distinction between whether the user manually deleted them, or whether it was automatically done as part of the deactivation process.
Facebook lost me a while back when the Android app first came out. Logging into the site and finding contacts that had no account in my facebook "phonebook" felt like a breach of trust. I figured they'd act in good faith and enrich Android contacts with facebook data. I did NOT think they'd yank my contacts the other way, doing who-knows-what with it. Shame on me for not reading the app permissions with more scrutiny.
Leaving facebook removed a distraction I did not realize I was weary of. At risk of sounding dramatic, it felt like I got a few minutes a day of my life back.
"OMG! I deleted my Facebook account two months ago, and my friends just told me that they wished me birthday on my timeline last night. OMG! Facebook, I trusted you! Why!? OMG!"
Seriously, I love the last sentence of the article: "That is why I may delete my Facebook account. And that is why you should too."
If Facebook will not delete the posts on the Timeline, why is the author still believing that deleting the account will genuinely delete the account? The data you disclosed to the social network is here to stay. The only way you can stop is to not give it more.
I wonder if this is the case because those wall posts aren't specifically yours. You posted those onto another user's timeline, and thus it's probably not within your power to delete them. I'm not saying that this is the right thing to do, but it fits with the available data. If you removed all your photos and they're still gone, but wall posts are still there, it's an issue with how Facebook view data ownership. If you delete status updates or relationships, work etc, they stay gone too I imagine.
Yesterday I started deleting all my FB content. My FB account got locked and released 24h later. When I logged in, all my content was restored. I'm still trying to understand why.
I deleted my twitter profile picture as well as account in 2008. I had a url of the profile image saved. After five years the the link works and image is still there.
This usually happens because the image is stored on a third party CDN, and their delete process probably just touches their local data. Of course they can delete stuff off the CDN, but I can see why this might have been missed. If you contact Twitter support, they can probably fix this.
For the 100th time, the only reason any of us are on Facebook and not Google+ or MySpace or Friendster or whatever is because all of our friends are on there with us.
Facebook can and will do whatever it wants to abuse this fact, and as long as they provide the most convenient way to communicate with other people, there is nothing we can do about it, period.
So rant away, my Internet friends, it's all we can do anyway.
The only reason I am on Facebook and also not use AdBlock on Google Search is, I am in the internet business. And if you are in the internet-business, you do have to be a part of the system: all in.
I do not want to mull over a social media monetizing idea and wonder if Facebook has already figured it out. I just need to be there and know it myself.
I am not going to waste time deleting all of my content a third time.
I did that once, there's a Firefox extension (the name escapes me at the moment sorry) you can use to create macros. Sure it's useless in a way, but it's also fun in a way :D If it pops back, it's macro time again -- better than nothing, right?
I used one of the userscripts.org extensions for that and it caused my FB account to get locked for 24h. When I came back all my content had been restored (I know that because while the script was working, I had another window opened checking the progress).
Now the extension does not work anymore (the button it adds to the setting pages is not showing).
Thats exactly the reason why we built http://pixter.in . Facebook's incentive is to get as much data of you and retain it. Our incentive is to build the best product. If your incentive's are clear and aligned things like this won't happen.
Regarding:
>> Or is it? If Facebook doesn’t understand what should happen when I delete my wall posts, who’s to say that if I delete my account, it won’t come back too?
I thought I had deleted my account in 2009, but I was curious when I saw this. It turns out I can still log in. Curious...
I'll give you a little advice that's been working wonderfully for me so far - don't ever post something that is politically/ethnically/whatever questionable and you'll be fine. Even better than that, it'll play in your favour.
I also run a pretty tight ship on Facebook. Only closest friends and family (13 people in total), visibility to friends only and such things.
Father created Facebook account a week ago to keep up with our favourite sports team. I sent him a friend request but he managed to hide it and didn't find it later. Yesterday he received an email saying something in this style: Do you know these people? A list with 13 people was underneath it and these 13 people were my friends.
Thankfully he knows most of them so it didn't get awkward but still a massive, massive worry for me.
Should you enter your real information on any internet site? It's kind of like when stores ask for your phone number: there's no real obligation to them to not use it for spam or re-sell it. I always give a fake and ask them to email.
"Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me."
It's simple folks. If you still trust FB with anything at this point you're going to get hurt. If you do trust them with something and they burn you then it's your fault.
I think the title is an overreaction. Just because something can and has violated your trust doesn't mean you should never trust it. Never is a very strong word.
Looking at the trends, I suspect Facebook will be the goat in the tech group cull that's being contemplated.[1] The reasons for thinking this are three-fold:
a) Extremely poor share performance post-IPO (which has irked a lot of heavy-weights) and demise of Zynga's revenue sources. Although ad revenue is there, there's a lot of industry research showing that $/click return is minimal at best (out of all of these models, FB appears to have the lowest, and easiest to Bot). FB ad revenue has more to do with the current glut in Corporate $cash holdings than real returns, fyi.
b) Lack of utility outside data mining / advertising (all others, even dead ducks like Yahoo! have secondary and tertiary utility, not to mention the shining lights like Google who are still willing to push the envelope). By this, I'm not referencing Social Utility, but Business Utility.
c) Their ties to NSA / current security concerns go so far beyond the base level of acceptance that it's a given they'll suffer hard blow-back. Those Bilderberg meetings weren't about unicorns and skittles and any serious business should be concerned about having their employees mined so easily (and in certain fields, more open to Social Engineering hacks directly due to this intel). Even as an American company, you'd want this be considering this; for the rest of the world, it's a major concern.
You can argue about these, but I suspect as they hit their 10 year mark, there will be a hotter, faster, hungrier and probably more honest model to replace them (i.e. "We will do X with this data - agree, and get Y benefit, or even better - we'll pay you Z for it, and not in Farmville Tokens, or even "pay Z+1 to go dark").
Anyhow, since this is free commentary, YMMV. But, realistically - the age of the "Dumb Fucks" is closing. Wild Wild West is ending, and the Buffalo ain't roaming no more. If you need that explained: a large amount of the cash generated by web 2.0 (e.g. Huffington Post sale) was created by parasitical leveraging of user's ignorance & goodwill. I suspect that's about to change with a newer generation; although, hey, Pop Idol still makes money, so perhaps not - but it will only be farming the ignorant, which is hardly "cutting edge". Face Book as the online Walmart - there's an image to take to heart as you look @ it's stock price over the next 6 months.
Full disclosure: Never had a Face Book account, because Privacy / Anonymity is the coolest thing in a connected world, nor do I hold any FB stock, nor am I shorting FB stock in any manner.
[1]FT - Real progressives believe in breaking up Google (no link, as it is pay walled). I don't agree with the opinion piece, I'm merely using it to denote a recent trend.
"My name is Scott Renfro, and I’m a software engineer at Facebook working on security and privacy. We’ve put a lot of work into making deletions permanent"
When my wife and I were first dating, for religious and cultural reasons her parents didn't know. Her parents are conservative Muslims and mine conservative Christians. She had a picture of the two of us as her profile picture, and it was set to private (that existed once). More importantly in the picture she wasn't wearing the hijab (the head scarf).
One day Facebook removed the ability to have private profile pictures - automatically converting every profile picture to public. Her sister saw the picture and long story short that was the last time she talked to her parents. That was 2+ years ago. Facebook can't be blamed for the cultural and relationship issues at play here, but they can be blamed for how they went about this. And we can be blamed for trusting them.
I still use facebook. I don't blame them for trying new things, pushing the boundaries, etc. I have however learned that no matter what that data isn't mine. It's facebooks. And whenever facebook decides to innovate they will do whatever they want with their data to try doing it.