facebook’s zuckerberg answers questions; unfortunately none were important

In response to the wake of recent criticism and controversy stirred up by Facebook’s change to their Terms-of-Service, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg sat down to answer some questions. Unfortunately, no one asked him the right questions. Zuckerberg said in defense of Facebook’s new policies:

“When a person shares information on Facebook, they first need to grant Facebook a license to use that information so that we can show it to the other people they’ve asked us to share it with. Without this license, we couldn’t help people share that information,” stated Mark Zuckerberg on the Facebook blog. “One of the questions about our new terms of use is whether Facebook can use this information forever. When a person shares something like a message with a friend, two copies of that information are created—one in the person’s sent messages box and the other in their friend’s inbox. Even if the person deactivates their account, their friend still has a copy of that message. We think this is the right way for Facebook to work, and it is consistent with how other services like email work. One of the reasons we updated our terms was to make this more clear.” (pulse2.com)

While this does address some of the concerns raised, it leaves out most of the more troubling portions of the changed clause. The new controversial clause reads as follows:

You hereby grant Facebook an irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid, worldwide license (with the right to sublicense) to (a) use, copy, publish, stream, store, retain, publicly perform or display, transmit, scan, reformat, modify, edit, frame, translate, excerpt, adapt, create derivative works and distribute (through multiple tiers), any User Content you (i) Post on or in connection with the Facebook Service or the promotion thereof subject only to your privacy settings or (ii) enable a user to Post, including by offering a Share Link on your website and (b) to use your name, likeness and image for any purpose, including commercial or advertising, each of (a) and (b) on or in connection with the Facebook Service or the promotion thereof.

The troubling portions of the clause, none of which were addressed, are emphasized in bold for your reading pleasure. Many users feed their blogs through Facebook as a way of keeping friends updated on new posts. Actually, if I did my math right, about 1/4 of the people who read my blog post will be reading this on Facebook. According to the new TOS, my blog, because it is fed through Facebook, is theirs to use at their discretion.

What may be even more troubling is the portion that reads “including by offering a Share Link on your website…”. How many websites offer Facebook share-links on their website? It is without a doubt well into the millions. Most any blog or online publication knows that a Facebook share-link is a sure-fire way to attract readers. Does this mean just the presence of a Facebook submission button constitutes the legal right for Facebook to distribute the information at their discretion and wont?

Alexander van Elsas saw right through the shallow response to the most benign of the TOS’s changes. In his (as always) outstanding post Mark Zuckerberg is Answering the Wrong Question, and We Fell for it Again, Van Elsas writes:

…I cannot help but feel that the blogging community has let Mark get away with answering the wrong question. He has done a perfect job in avoiding a much more important privacy issue than the issue that arises when two people share information via Facebook.

The questions Mark should have answered are the following:

What exactly does Facebook do with all the user data has been collected on Facebook, and how exactly does it monetize that, even after a user has deleted his or her account?

I could care less about the information I share with others via Facebook. That sharing process is a conscious act. I know that if I share that whatever gets shared is out of my control. What I do not know is what Facebook does with that information. Why do they tap into all of my interactions and my data? What do they store, and how do they monetize that exactly? If I set my privacy settings as strict as possible do they still see everything? How is that data being used outside of Facebook? Do 3rd parties get access to that information as well, even if I do not want them too?

The problem at hand isn’t users sharing things on Facebook. It isn’t even controlling privacy on Facebook. The problem is that I do not have a clue or option to protect myself from Facebook. Any service that monetizes user data and interactions indirectly using a free but advertisement business model puts the value of the network in front of the value of the individual user. You get a free service, but you do not know exactly what you are giving up for that. And that is what Mark should be explaining. The rest is just a decoy so that the really difficult questions do not need to be answered.

I might not even mind that Facebook monetizes my user data, my friends, and my interactions. But right now, I don’t know how Facebook uses that data.We might think that our online lives are not connected to our real lives. We might even think that privacy is dead. But the problem is not that privacy is dead, but that it is distributed unevenly. In other words, the user is forced into total transparency when signing up for services like Facebook. But the service itself lacks transparency. There is no way we are going to find out what Facebook does with us. And it is this unbalanced relationship that we should be worried about. Mark Zukcerberg does a great job answering the wrong question, and we all fell for it again.

Are Facebook users truly satiated by this non-response by Zuckerberg? It seems that for now the controversy has died down, despite a distinct lack of questions of consequence being answered. It seems that the same users who let Facebook’s TOS nearly slip past them were just as easily duped by Zuckerberg’s non-answer. The same users who were shocked to learn that Flickr, Gmail, Yahoo, Tumblr and most other popular social networking services have similar TOS’s to Facebook's revised version. Fool us once, shame on you, fool us again--shame on us.

Alexander van Elsa had it right when he said Zuckerberg duped us again. I have a feeling this won’t be the last time.