The Great Debate

from MediaFile:

Should you trust Facebook with your email?

Michael Fertik

Nov 19, 2010 14:05 EST

- Michael Fertik is the CEO and Founder of ReputationDefender, the online privacy and reputation company. The views expressed are his own. -

Facebook already knows a massive amount about you.  They know your age, what you look like, what you like, what you do for fun, where you go, what you eat, whom you know, whom you know well, whom you sleep with, who your best friends and family are, and, again, how old they are, what they like, and so on.

On top of that, Facebook has a well-known history of privacy breaches or at least snafus.  Publicly they seem committed to the notion that privacy is dead.  Their CEO and Founder has said as much.

Never mind that this view is not shared by the public, which is hungry for privacy in the digital age.  And never mind that the “death of privacy” would serve exactly the interests of a digital media company.  It seems that it may be an honestly held belief among top leadership of Facebook that privacy is and should be dead.

Now, Facebook is expanding its reach even further.  It will be rolling out a unified, cross-platform messaging system that will combine features of email, SMS, and chat.  The company will offer users @facebook.com email addresses.  At first blush, there’s nothing altogether new about the development from a technical standpoint.  Unified messaging has been a goal since the advent of disunified messaging—more or less since SMS, IM, and chat became comparably popular and used in parallel.

But a Facebook-based unified messaging system may offer different appeal and new risks, and not just because it can instantaneously distribute its feature set to its 500 million-plus user base.

It is impossible for a digital media company to care deeply about privacy.  You are the only asset they have to sell.  The promise of advertising in the Internet age is that the platform can connect a brand with the individual person most likely to buy.  The only way that happens is through the collection and use of huge amounts of data about each of us, followed by the sale of access to the data or the person they describe.

Are social media platforms the Jurassic Park of computing?

– Kevin Prince is chief technology officer of Perimeter E-Security. The views expressed are his own. –

Social Networks have grown out of control. Literally. Today, neither users nor social networking companies can control the monsters they have created. Think Jurassic Park: where John Hammond wanted to build something no one else had ever done, a fun theme park combined with a zoo of cloned dinosaurs.  He built what he thought would be adequate security, but in reality, didn’t understand nearly enough about the environment he was trying to control.  People naturally trusted that proper security was in place and that they would of course be safe. Quickly things spiral out of control, and nearly everyone gets eaten by the end of the movie.

The creators of social networking sites — yes all of them — are just like John Hammond. Their unique ideas caught on in such a viral way that just keeping up with the bandwidth, processing power, storage, development, and everything else required to keep the system online is an amazingly complex, never-ending task. For most of these sites, security is – and has always been – an afterthought. Some of them try, but it’s a bit like closing the amusement park gates after the Tyrannosaurus has bolted.

The users of social networking sites also contribute to the problem. Most are absolutely reckless when it comes to behavior on the sites. A while ago, I ran a social networking experiment on Facebook. I created a new user profile based on a free Google mail account. I chose the name Rebecca Johnson, made her 26, and used a profile picture of a three-year-old girl in a dress that I snagged from a department store website. No other information was in the profile. I wanted to see what would happen when I invited random strangers to be friends with this fictitious person.

Lucky for me, Facebook presents you with people it thinks you might know. Due to a lack of information in my profile, Facebook presented me with people of all ages that live in my county (obviously they were looking at my IP address and correlating that with my city). I of course knew none of these people but went ahead and invited them and others. In all, I invited 250 totally random people to be my friends. The only criteria I used: they had to have profile pictures. My logic: if you don’t have a profile picture, you’re probably not a serious or frequent user. Here’s a timetable of what happened next.

8:00am – Invite Friends 8:02am – My first friend accepts the invitation 9:00am – 6 Friends 10:00am – 12 Friends 3:00pm – 28 Friends

Facebook ruined my life

— Linsey Fryatt is editor of stuff.tv. The views expressed are her own. –

It’s facebook’s fifth birthday this week. And while I love every status-updating, picture-tagging, friend-stalking pixel of it, I often wish it had never been invented.

Its obvious time-thievery and propensity to turn me into an obsessive page refresher, jonesing for my next next notification fix aside, I find Facey-B was the first step in a downward spiral (if spirals can have steps) to my entire life being played out online in some form or other. And I’m exhausted.

“The Facebook” was started by Mark Zukerberg on Feb 4 2004 while he was a student at Harvard University. Initially it was a way for the Ivy League students to easily network and identify each other. In half a decade this pet project has grown to over 150 million members and an estimated value of $5billion.

What’s great about facebook is that unlike email, it creates a little online village of your friends – conversations are no longer singular, but circular, drawing everyone into the mix. When I recently asked what my middle name should be, I received answers from the US, France and Scotland, varying from “Sigourney” to “Riot” to “Dimmer Switch”.

What’s also great in a deliciously shallow sense is that it lets you act as your own personal PR agency. Careful selection of status updates, images and daily actions mean that “Brand Fryatt” is far more interesting, funny and having much more fun than the actual me.

But that’s also why it sucks. I find myself poring over my mates’ albums of them teaching in Thailand, skiing in the Alps, partying in Shoreditch, and wonder where my life went wrong, why their friends look more fun than mine, and why I’m still up at 2am on a Wednesday.