To make peace, maybe Google should buy Facebook. Or is it the other way round?
Facebook Slaps Google: “Openness Doesn’t Mean Being Open When It’s Convenient”
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Re: Facebook Slaps Google: “Openness Doesn’t Mean Being Open When It’s Convenient”
#32Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hey, a failure to respect privacy is just direct evidence of openness, right? (Disclaimer. I may be biased by working for Google. But I'm also not opposed to switching from a BSD to GPL strategy to encourage freedom.)
Laugh while you can. During the Buzz launch, I recall Google found it just as hard to negotiate the intrinsically tricky balance between privacy and openness. There is a real trade-off between the two in products that allow you to share information with groups larger than one. Good luck with your new social product.
I'm fully aware of this. However I happen to personally believe that Google's missteps have been far less than Facebook's - and less intentional.
I'm sure that both companies will continue to fail to find the perfect balance. I'm strongly inclined to believe that Google will fail less. (However people will continue to hold us to a higher standard.)
Re: Facebook Slaps Google: “Openness Doesn’t Mean Being Open When It’s Convenient”
#33[deleted]
Re: Facebook Slaps Google: “Openness Doesn’t Mean Being Open When It’s Convenient”
#34Openness also doesn't mean being a sucker. Share and share-alike provides an optimal solution to the iterated prisoner's dilemma of openness.
They're stuck in a continuous defect!
Not at all - Google is defecting, but is offering to cease defecting under certain conditions. It's only continuous if Facebook keeps being a jerk.
Re: Facebook Slaps Google: “Openness Doesn’t Mean Being Open When It’s Convenient”
#35It's interesting how noone wants to actually respond to the arguments that Mike Vernal is making, instead resorting to the equivalent of "Facebook is evil, how dare they say they aren't!".
If I happend to email you once 2 years ago did I consent to be linked to you when you join Facebook?
Re: Facebook Slaps Google: “Openness Doesn’t Mean Being Open When It’s Convenient”
#36Would anybody like to actually read the words, understand them, and engage with the argument they contain, rather than snark about how FB == teh hatez? The meat of it is: "Each person owns her friends list, but not her friends’ information. A person has no more right to mass export all of her friends’ private email addresses than she does to mass export all of her friends’ private photo albums. Email is different fro…
Yes, let engage with this position. I claim it's conniving double-talk: "Email is different from social networking because in an email application, each person maintains and owns their own address book, whereas in a social network your friends maintain their information and you just maintain a list of friends. Because of this, we think it makes sense for email applications to export email addresses and for social networks to export friend lists."
Hmm, so the (arguable) implication first is that an email address are more personal than a friend-name. They're more like photos, somehow. So sharing these is a more personal thing than just sharing the name of a friend. But then, email program should still export email addresses? (why, 'cause it's an "email program"!) I suppose then, a photo sharing program should allow you to export your friends' photos where-ever too??
The whole idea of what's appropriate to share is ill-defined and nebulous but this particular effort to draw a line is just a hoot... "Time flies like an arrow, fruit flies like a banana"
Re: Facebook Slaps Google: “Openness Doesn’t Mean Being Open When It’s Convenient”
#37They made up their contorted Social Expectation. Most of us have never really thought of what we expect our friends to be able to do with our information. I think we all assume that we trust our friends to occasionally share too much but you have to trust them to some point to just use their best judgement, even now they can go share your email anyway.
One way network grabs are cheap tactics. A user should be able to leave a network with the data that's been entrusted in them, just like with Address books, Calendars, or other trustingly shared data.
This is all about crippling the convenience of people leaving their network for competitors. You can already share with out permission, just not easily. This isn't about protecting our privacy, it's just about slowing down our power to go elsewhere at will.
Re: Facebook Slaps Google: “Openness Doesn’t Mean Being Open When It’s Convenient”
#38So their theory here is that when I add a friend on Facebook, I am really saying this: "I share some of my contact info with you, but only as long as we both use Facebook?" That's a convenient notion if you happen to work for Big #3b5998. But I think almost anyone would agree that it's really two people making a connection, and Facebook is just the middleman.
The theory is that by accepting someone's friend request you're not automatically granting them the ability to export your email address to any application that asks for it. If it were possible there's a good chance your inbox would quickly be filled with spam from apps your friends use. I know of no social network, including Google's own Orkut, Twitter, and Myspace, which allows this kind of mass exportation of friend emails via its API.
Re: Facebook Slaps Google: “Openness Doesn’t Mean Being Open When It’s Convenient”
#39So their theory here is that when I add a friend on Facebook, I am really saying this: "I share some of my contact info with you, but only as long as we both use Facebook?" That's a convenient notion if you happen to work for Big #3b5998. But I think almost anyone would agree that it's really two people making a connection, and Facebook is just the middleman.
A slightly different way to look at it is "I share some of my contact info with you as long as I can control how you use it (e.g. look but don't re-share, I can revoke it later, etc.)." Facebook allows that kind of control by preventing data export.
Re: Facebook Slaps Google: “Openness Doesn’t Mean Being Open When It’s Convenient”
#40Would anybody like to actually read the words, understand them, and engage with the argument they contain, rather than snark about how FB == teh hatez? The meat of it is: "Each person owns her friends list, but not her friends’ information. A person has no more right to mass export all of her friends’ private email addresses than she does to mass export all of her friends’ private photo albums. Email is different fro…
A friend won't care that you have their email address it's sorta expected, and one could also argue about whether an email address is even private information. Or maybe Facebook could allow the export of some other friend identifier.
Indeed,
If, for example, you used the email of your friend to email them, you would have the address in your email program...
So Facebook is saying that it's OK that you could take the email address and put it in your email program and address book - but that automatically doing so is "just crossing the line"...