Recently, Facebook asked me to fill out a survey regarding their privacy practices and features. Most of the questions were run-of-the-mill user experience modeling, but one in particular really stood out to me:
Do you trust Facebook with your personal information?
My response needed to be on a numeric scale from 1 to 5: 1 being no trust at all, 5 being complete trust. In all fairness, I probably spent way too much time thinking about how to respond, but those of you who know me know I love nuanced answers (hence this post about a silly survey). After much thoughtful consideration, I answered “1”. Let me explain why.
Facebook’s business is in personalized marketing. Facebook makes money by selling advertising space to businesses and organizations who wish to target specific audiences. By analyzing the information you submit to Facebook, as well as all the sites you visit that have a Facebook “Like” button or comment system on them, Facebook is able to generate a robust dossier of your interests, social status, intelligence, purchasing power, how influenced you are by advertisements, and so on. The better or more accurate this collection of information is, the more Facebook can charge advertisers for ads targeted against it. This is not inherently “good” or “bad”, it’s just what marketing looks like in the 21st century. I do trust Facebook to comply with their privacy policy and user agreement. However, knowing Facebook uses my information this way does affect how I interact with it.
As a rule of thumb, I share about as much on Facebook as I would with someone I sat next to on the bus or train. I don’t generally “Like” things, and I’m very particular about what links I post, and what posts I’ll comment on. I don’t tag people in photos, and I prefer not to be tagged in posts. I don’t share much about important life events or family, and I try not to post too much in general. It probably has little effect on Facebook’s ability to garnish useful info from my profile, but it makes me feel better. Also, if my or one of my friends’ accounts is compromised, the hacker doesn’t have access to a whole bunch of my information that I’ve shared with friends.
On another level, though, I thought the question “Do you trust Facebook” could have been more informative to the surveyors had it been asked like this:
“Do you trust Facebook more or less than other sites on the internet?”
My answer to that question is “about the same”, and it’s because I don’t trust any sites more than I have to. I don’t believe Facebook is evil or untrustworthy, I just prefer to be very cautious in what I share online. It seems like every week there’s an announcement about how some service or site was compromised, resulting in thousands or millions of users’ information being purloined. Approaching this problem from the perspective that leaks and hacks are inevitable, it makes sense to restrict how much information I share, whether it’s Facebook, Google, Twitter, or any other site.
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