Tag Archives: privacy

Users revolt: blog network turns out to be owned by a marketing agency

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Not a day goes by without some kind of revelation about what’s being done with our user-generated content and our personal information on social networking sites and blog networks. The scandal around Facebook’s Beacon project, whose aim is to track and broadcast what Facebook users are doing on the Web, forced Facebook to back down.

In France, there’s a mini-scandal brewing over a blog network called Ladies Room (www.ladiesroom.fr), whose members create the content for the site. It turns out that Ladies Room is owned by a marketing agency called Heaven. A lot of people are upset because this was not clearly disclosed and had it been, several users would probably have never opted to become members. The French newspaper, Le Monde, talks about a strike among the contributors, but one of the commenters to the article says only a few members actually went on “strike” (i.e. refuse to post any more content). And again, one wonders who exactly this commenter is, whether she is really a member of the site or someone from the marketing agency (or a friend of the agency).

This is the biggest problem with these free services, whether they are social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace, blogging services, or applications like Twitter. How are they supposed to make money to cover the cost of doing business? Advertising. They must cater to the desires of those who pay them — the advertisers — even if it means using our personal data and content in a way that we did not envision or desire. There is a built-in aversion towards transparency, openness and honesty.

The solution: give members the option to remain on the free service (with the knowledge that their personal data and everything else they do on the site will be sold to the highest bidder); or pay (for privacy).

Desperately seeking: time and privacy

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I had just finished writing my post “Why Linked In does not work” where I explain why I left the business networking site (decluttering my life, stop wasting time), when I saw this post by Om Malik entitled “Can privacy be a premium service” about whether there is a business in providing people more privacy. Om says:

Time and privacy are two aspects of our modern lives that are in short supply . . . Time and its management are highly personal issues, but when it comes to privacy, the chinks outweigh the average person’s capabilities. And that prompted me to as the question: can privacy be offered as a value-added (premium) service by carriers and web service operators such as Google.

The most obvious way to save time is to:
- unsubscribe from mailing lists
- pare down the list of blogs on one’s RSS news reader
- delete (and refuse to respond to) time-wasting emails (from people who want you to do their work for them)
- stop using Twitter or Jaiku
- minimize use of social networking sites

To protect one’s privacy, it’s best not to join any online business or social networks. But there are certain services that may be very useful, e.g. Google search and location-based services, that inform others of what you are up to, either in your head on physically. Om points out that search engines do a poor job in privacy protection probably because they sell ads around the searches.

Is the concern over privacy an age-related one, with the under 30 generation not at all bothered about having their revealing photos and intimate details online for all to see?

Why I’m not falling for the Facebook hype

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Here I am again, this time on Facebook, typing in the same details I had typed in at Friendster, Orkut, Tribe and MySpace. I could have done it my sleep, answering the same inane questions about my favorite TV shows, movies, books, hobbies, and interests. So I have to tell yet another social network that I still hate TV, I love John Cheever’s books and Sofia Coppola’s movies, and I enjoy cooking and traveling.

I can think of better ways to spend a lovely summer afternoon in Amsterdam than typing in the same pieces of information for the fifth time in three years. But I have to try this “new” thing because my techie friends in San Francisco are telling me I should try it, and Marc Andreessen (founder of Netscape) says:

To start, my personal opinion is that the new Facebook Platform is a dramatic leap forward for the Internet industry.

I can’t argue with Marc, whose experience in these matters exceeds mine.

So, am I the only idiot who can’t figure out what’s so great about Facebook? It does nothing for me. It’s a total waste of time like Friendster, Orkut, Tribe and MySpace (where my languishing profile has not been updated in a year and Keane still plays “Bedshaped”). I added these applications to my Facebook page: Flickr, Twitter and Flixster (where I found that one of my favorite films, “Der Untergang” had an unpopularity rating of 64%). I also added an application called My Books, but could not face having to add one by one the 248 books that are already listed in LibraryThing.

So what’s there for me in Facebook? I guess I could look up former classmates from high school and university, but why? If I haven’t kept in touch with them in the prehistoric days before Facebook, why should I do it now? Was there anyone I really missed? My current friends already know where to find me. They know where my Flickr photos are posted and the bookworms among them already share their libraries with me on LibraryThing.

Must everything be turned into a portal?

Go back a few years, back in the days of the dot-com boom, before someone coined the term “social networking site”. We had these one-stop shop operations then. They were called portals and their valuations were in the billions of dollars. I’m thinking of Yahoo, MSN, and Lycos. And there was Spray Network, a pan-European portal I joined in early 2000, at the height of the craziness, as its first and last chief legal officer.

Each portal promised to be the ONE place where you would do everything: catch up on email, read news, shop, find movies, etc. By attracting all those eyeballs, enticing people to set up accounts and keeping them on it for hours a day (they hoped), the portals could sell massive amounts of advertising (they thought).

Indeed, there were and still are a lot of people who visit their Yahoo home page. Not me. That’s the glory of the Internet. I don’t have to rely on Yahoo to find the things I need to shop for or to gather up the news I want to read. All of that is a click away. On the Internet. I have old-fashioned tabs on my browser with my favorite sites. There’s even a search engine called Google.

Now, it appears that the idea of a portal never really died. The one-stop shop idea has carried over into the open-API social networking hype of the moment. Facebook’s investors use a more sophisticated argument that combines the latest buzz words and trends: open API meets social networking.

And why not? Those investors have to make Facebook seem like anything but a 1999 portal otherwise there’s no billion dollar exit via an IPO or a MySpace-like acquistion by a media conglomerate or even by (don’t-call-me-a-portal) Yahoo.

Here’s the argument: Facebook’s not a portal, it’s a one-stop place where you can access your photos that are posted on another site (Flickr), your books (My Books), your movie reviews (Flixster). And somehow all this is just more convenient that whatever you’ve been doing before plus to get to find your old long lost friends and make new pals.

By opening up their API, Facebook has indeed made it easier for online services like Twitter and Flickr to integrate their applications into the Facebook interface. So now, you can access Twitter right there on your Facebook profile page. Never mind that it takes only a few seconds to open up another browser window to type your Twitter news or access your Flickr photos.

Here’s the other argument people use in favor of using Facebook: your friends can see all of your books and movie reviews on one page, and best of all, other people who are connected to your friends, can also become your friends on Facebook. This sounds exactly like Friendster and it did not work for me. The only people who consistently pestered me were “connection hounds” — people who loved to brag that they had 1000+ friends. They were exactly the kind of “friends” I did not want to have.

I have two blogs and my friends read my postings there. They know where my Flickr photos are posted and where LibraryThing books are archived. If I reviewed a movie, restaurant, hotel, or beach chiringuito, it’s going to be on my personal blog, Rosecantine.

What’s behind Facebook?

Advertising. Can you think of another model? I can’t, so again maybe I am missing something.

What kinds of ads do you think I’ll get from them? Let me guess, the same sort of mass market ads I got from Yahoo, MSN, and Lycos back in the old portal days. Shopping will consist of chain store offerings from the GAP and Victoria’s Secret, film and music promotions will no doubt consist of mainstream acts and Hollywood’s latest garbage, and TV – more garbage, or what the Spanish call “telebasura”.

And unlike Flickr, where your photos are yours, everything you enter into Facebook belongs to them. How nice. I get pitched bucket loads of ads, don’t make any money for taking the trouble of helping them sell ads, and then they own my content. Along the way, I help the founders and investors get their $$$ exit.

Sounds like a portal.

[Note: I loved working at Spray Network. I had great colleagues and was really upset when we did not go forward with our IPO in 2000. We sold the company to Lycos Europe at the end of 2000 for $550 million. Lycos Europe wrote off $500 million in 2001.]

Update (10-10-2007): Check out this post by Jason Kottke who thinks Facebook is also overrated: http://www.kottke.org/07/06/facebook-is-the-new-aol