Why I hate Facebook

I don’t make a secret of the fact that I dislike Facebook, but I still use it. Sort of. Barely. And begrudgingly.

What is it about Facebook that I dislike so much? Is it the pokes, zombies and other random crap that initially flooded my inbox there?

Well, yes. But mostly it’s the cavalier attitude the company has taken toward user privacy, combined with the ongoing requests to give up more and more data and walled garden approach they’ve taken to that data. Now, with Facebook Connect, the company wants to become the hub for cross-site identity management.

I don’t trust them to do that.

Privacy? What privacy?

You may remember the ham-handed way Facebook introduced the news feed feature a couple of years ago. That’s ancient history, and the furor has died down now that people know what to expect.

Then there was last year’s Beacon fiasco. You can now opt out of Beacon, if you know where to look. Thanks, Facebook.

These aren’t necessarily bad features (well, Beacon was bad), but the way Facebook foisted them on their users was inept, disrespectful, and — from a privacy perspective — clueless.

People have a right to know how, when and where their personal data is used. If you want to change the game, get permission.

We are controlling transmission

To Facebook’s credit, their privacy controls have improved over the last year. But you’re still not fully in control of how your information is used, since data that you make available to your friends is potentially available to their applications.

When a friend of yours visits an application or authorizes it, the information that the application can access includes your friend’s friend list and information about the people on that list.

Thus it can access some information about you. Please note that applications are obligated only to act upon the request of your friend and must respect all of your existing privacy settings.

More data in the garden

The number of Facebook users has doubled in the last year, and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg thinks the amount of information people share online will also double year-over-year. He’s probably right. With more than 130 million active Facebook users, that’s a lot of data.

Thanks to Facebook Applications, the company has become itself into an aggregation point for user-generated content. As a the entry point to other Web sites through Facebook Connect, even content on other sites will start flowing into Facebook.

One sign-on to rule them all

Wired’s Michael Calore explains:

By being able to use a Facebook ID to log in to Digg, the user’s barrier of entry is lowered significantly and Digg gets more traffic. Likewise, Facebook can continue to collect data about him even when he leaves Facebook. If the user leaves the data sharing option on, every click on Digg becomes, by extension, another data point on Facebook.

I like the idea of single sign-on. I use OpenID, even though it’s… opaque. And I’m not going to get up in arms about the fact that Facebook Connect and OpenID are not interoperable. I’ll leave that to the Open Web zealots.

But this still bothers me:

Data gathered by Facebook Connect on a third-party site can only go one place once it leaves — straight back into Facebook.

The bottom line
More and more data is flowing into Facebook, a company that has demonstrated poor judgment about data privacy, and it’s not flowing back out. That troubles me.

But as much as I dislike Facebook, I’m not leaving it. For all its faults, it’s unavoidable.