For last few months, I have been thinking about the kind of content we are creating over the Facebook. The issue is not regarding the content but its usage, specially with Facebook as the owner of the content.
The problem started arising with the amount of applications mushrooming for the FB platform. Users are promoted for “access” but there are many concerns amongst experts that someone can write an application to bypass that process or disguise an application, whose real purpose is to gather data. A typical example of this is – when we add an application to play some game. They do not need to access our information such as birthday, marital status etc. But we have to grant that access to use that application and we don’t know what they are going to do with our data.
My second concern is regarding the way facebook is handling the data. In November 2008 FB lost all the preferences data and asked user to set there preferences once again. What if they lose some other relevant data or expose this data to some groups.
As far as data loss goes, this isn’t that big a deal. The only data that Facebook lost was preference data, not any messages, photos, videos, or the like. But preference data is also important. What if Facebook had lost everyone’s privacy settings instead of just their e-mail notification settings? It would be (slightly) more serious. – TechCrunch
Third concern is regarding the trust with Facebook. In the episode 181 of Twit, while discussing the topic of Facebook opening its API for status updates (to compete with Twitter) there were few interesting observations made by Wil Wheaton. According to him, How can we trust facebook of not selling our data to some other agencies? How can we trust that they will not misuse our data. Specially when threats like identity theft are becoming more serious, a little mistake on their part can cause serious damages.
Fourth concern is regarding the option of not allowing us to delete our account. Few days back I wanted to delete my account and I realized that there was no such option. The closest thing to that is suspension of account and that can be reactivated by one mail. Why don’t they want to delete my personal data from their servers. If I want to leave your site, I have right to erase all my information from your server.
Fifth concern is regarding the latest Terms of Conditions change by Facebook. According to new TOC, facebook has rights to all the content that we generate or upload on FB. As per Consumerist blog
Now, anything you upload to Facebook can be used by Facebook in any way they deem fit, forever, no matter what you do later. Want to close your account? Good for you, but Facebook still has the right to do whatever it wants with your old content. They can even sublicense it if they want.
Then, I have some little concerns regarding FB connect where users might be able to write cross-server scripts too and exploit Facebook.
I agree that every person who has a web presence (might)wants to be on FB. But we can reduce the amount of data that we put online. Whatever data we put, we should be comfortable enough if we lose it. I don’t think only facebook is the problem, over time we had discussed same issues with Google and any organization that grows big in size.
