{"id":249,"date":"2010-05-14T15:21:43","date_gmt":"2010-05-14T15:21:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.innerhippy.com\/?p=249"},"modified":"2012-06-05T08:18:30","modified_gmt":"2012-06-05T08:18:30","slug":"in-facebook-we-trusted","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.innerhippy.com\/?p=249","title":{"rendered":"In Facebook We Trusted"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>So, Facebook&#8217;s insidious privacy policy has finally broken into the mainstream media. &#8216;Bout time. And there&#8217;s something significant that Zuckerberg <em>et al.<\/em> is either ignoring or doesn&#8217;t quite get &#8211; and that&#8217;s the trust model between users and information brokers like Facebook.<\/p>\n<p>On Wednesday I went to an interesting discussion &#8220;<a title=\"Gus Hosein - Guardian\" href=\"http:\/\/www.guardian.co.uk\/commentisfree\/libertycentral\/2010\/may\/12\/making-internet-safe-free-speech\" target=\"_blank\">Is the Internet Safe for Free Speech<\/a>&#8220;, in which Richard Allan, Facebook&#8217;s Director of EU Policy, defended their recent controversial policy changes. He didn&#8217;t get it either.<\/p>\n<p>When geeks create virtual <em>shiny new toys<\/em> for people to play with, there is a sense of altruistic satisfaction which often serves as sufficient reward alone. That&#8217;s why I create shiny new toys at work and at home &#8211; because I love making them. But this is also an engineering task in which the toy&#8217;s environment is a vital consideration. At work it&#8217;s called professionalism, at home social responsibility.<\/p>\n<p>Allan argued that Facebook&#8217;s engineers we so passionate and so enthusiastic that sometimes they forgot to engineer a <em>remove<\/em> button into their toy. Either that&#8217;s utter rubbish or just plain terrifying, you decide.<\/p>\n<p>But here&#8217;s the key &#8211; people will only engage with you and your &#8216;product&#8217; as long as the net benefit is in their favour. Yes, they will accept some monetisation (toll), but principally the user is in charge &#8211; they hold the trust. Or to borrow the maxim from an ancient world, &#8220;the customer is king&#8221;. Yes Mark, even when the toys can&#8217;t be bought.<\/p>\n<p>The trust model is simple: the company must act in the best interest of its customers, and not for itself.<\/p>\n<p>Over time, Facebook has eroded this trust to breaking point. And now the trust is gone. Boof! The perception that Facebook is a friendly shiny toy for us all to enjoy has evaporated. We all loved Facebook because it empowered us. We now see Facebook as nothing more than a shiny honey pot to trade our digital existence.<\/p>\n<p>Next chapter, enter <a title=\"origin: Greek, \u03b4\u03b9\u03b1\u03c3\u03c0\u03bf\u03c1\u03ac \u2013 \u201ca scattering [of seeds]\u201d\" href=\"http:\/\/www.joindiaspora.com\" target=\"_blank\">diaspora<\/a>, a bunch of enthusiastic kids who want to create what we all thought Facebook was. They may not have the perfect shiny toy just yet, but one thing&#8217;s apparent &#8211; they <strong>do<\/strong> get it, and for that I wish them well.\ufeff<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>So, Facebook&#8217;s insidious privacy policy has finally broken into the mainstream media. &#8216;Bout time. And there&#8217;s something significant that Zuckerberg et al. is either ignoring or doesn&#8217;t quite get &#8211; and that&#8217;s the trust model between users and information brokers like Facebook. On Wednesday I went to an interesting discussion &#8220;Is the Internet Safe for [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[27],"tags":[29,28,30],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.innerhippy.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/249"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.innerhippy.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.innerhippy.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.innerhippy.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.innerhippy.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=249"}],"version-history":[{"count":19,"href":"https:\/\/blog.innerhippy.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/249\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":370,"href":"https:\/\/blog.innerhippy.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/249\/revisions\/370"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.innerhippy.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=249"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.innerhippy.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=249"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.innerhippy.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=249"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}