Facebook Says Users Can Leave -- If They Ask
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Facebook responded this week to user complaints that it's virtually impossible to delete an account from the social-networking Web site.
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Facebook.com, the No. 2 U.S.   social network site that is quickly expanding beyond its   college student base, has been met with a sudden privacy   backlash by users after it made design changes this week.
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The launch of Facebook&#39;s Beacon advertising system in November put the social networking site in the middle of a controversy over privacy, as&#160;Beacon was criticized for being too aggressive and stealthy in collecting and broadcasting information about users&#39; activities online. For that reason, few people right now would probably envy the job of Chris Kelly, Facebook&#39;s chief privacy officer and the person most responsible for explaining the site&#39;s policies to the public.IDG News Service recently caught up with Kelly for a telephone interview. He answered questions about Beacon, saying the company is happy with it now after some revisions but acknowledging that the work isn&#39;t over, so we may yet see further modifications that address remaining privacy concerns.He also tackled other hot topics, such as the company&#39;s efforts to protect minors from sexual predators as well as&#160;data portability, or the ability for users to move their data between different social networking services. Kelly said Facebook is in favor of data portability in principle but wary of it in part because of concerns about user privacy. That might surprise the critics who raised red flags over Beacon, but Kelly said there are legitimate concerns about privacy --&#160;and security as well --&#160;with data portability.The following is an edited transcript of the conversation:IDGNS: There has been a lot of talk recently about data portability, specifically about letting users of social networks export their data to other sites and applications. What&#39;s your take on data portability?Chris Kelly: We&#39;ve made it clear that we don&#39;t have a philosophical problem with data portability. The problem comes in because there are all sorts of privacy and security worries [related to it], and there are a whole bunch of people out there who would gladly attempt to exploit somebody else&#39;s personal information if they could get one point of entry into a network, for instance, and try to export as much data as possible.So we want to make sure there are rules and controls around that to minimize the possibility of something going off. That is a critical part of all of the discussions, and it&#39;s something that, in a rush to call for data portability, most proponents haven&#39;t effectively considered. We&#39;re trying to make sure that everyone considers that. We joined the Data Portability Workgroup because we want to show that we&#39;re serious about having that conversation. But to just say that you can have a completely open system ignores that there are serious privacy and security challenges about that.IDGNS: So given the privacy, security, and legal considerations that need to be taken into account, is a satisfying solution to data portability even possible?Kelly: Any system needs to reflect the actual preferences of the end-user of the data, and the end possessor of the data is the data subject. At Facebook, we&#39;ve obviously invested a great deal in building a preference-capturing system around that, and any portability scheme needs to reflect that type of information. We&#39;ll press for any data portability scheme to reflect the preferences of data subjects. That&#39;s a very important part of building an effective data portability setup.IDGNS: What&#39;s your current position regarding Beacon, which has been such a big source of controversy?Kelly: We&#39;ve gotten Beacon to a point where it gives users control over the information they&#39;re bringing into Facebook from third-party Web sites and sharing with their friends. The users are coming to understand the technology better. As Mark [Zuckerberg, Facebook&#39;s founder and CEO] has said, we made some mistakes in the launch, but we think we&#39;ve gotten Beacon to a very good point. We think users will have a great deal of comfort with how they share or don&#39;t share -- based on their own preferences -- actions on third-party Web sites off Facebook.IDGNS: Mark Zuckerberg has indicated in recent interviews that Facebook continues to work on and refine Beacon to further address lingering privacy concerns. Is that your understanding?Kelly: Yes, we learn a lot from user feedback and are constantly working to make the site more effective for our users.IDGNS: Could you articulate the importance of the bill that&#160;New York&#39;s Attorney General Andrew Cuomo and state legislative leaders are pushing and that Facebook, among others, is backing?Kelly: It&#39;s very important because it allows us to have unique identifiers that focus on sex offenders that we want to exclude from our site. We&#39;ve been asking for this type of help from Attorney General Cuomo and some of the other attorneys general. State legislatures are listening right now and trying to make it required that when people register as sex offenders, they record any Internet and online IDs [they have] and to make it a crime to access the Internet using anything besides those identifiers. This is a big assistance to us because it lets us easily check if anybody is trying to sign up with those addresses.IDGNS: How effective is that, considering you can get an e-mail address anytime without any verification as to who you are? Isn&#39;t this a cat-and-mouse game?Kelly: This is where the social factor of Facebook&#39;s real-name culture comes in and the privacy controls that we have. Those are very effective in protecting people from those who might attempt to misrepresent themselves. But we also want to make sure that anyone who would do our users harm is easily excluded, and this bill will help with that quite a bit.IDGNS: How feasible is it to come up with a tool or technology that lets social-networking site operators verify people&#39;s ages, in particular to identify -- and thus more closely protect -- underage users?Kelly: You can have effective indicators of whether or not someone is actually a member of a community, like a high school. Facebook has always had technology to try to determine whether someone is a member of a network or not and has restricted access to their information based on that. That has a great effect in pushing towards a type of proxy age verification. It&#39;s not perfect, though, and a lot of the discussions of age verification have focused on attempting perfection in determining whether or not someone is of a certain age, and that type of perfection can&#39;t be legislated effectively.IDGNS: A couple of weeks ago, MySpace and almost all state attorneys general announced an initiative outlining safety guidelines for social networking sites. Is that something Facebook plans to sign on to?Kelly: That agreement substantially reflected an agreement we had previously reached with Attorney General Cuomo, and we&#39;re very glad that MySpace has stepped up in this effort. We think that going forward, there will be a variety of principles agreed upon among certain leading Internet sites.IDGNS: Is it fair to say that the relationship between U.S. state attorneys general and social networking companies has significantly improved in recent months? It used to be quite adversarial and contentious.Kelly: At Facebook, we&#39;ve always tried to maintain a very open and honest dialogue with all the attorneys general and law enforcement agencies, and I think we&#39;re getting to a very good point with these law enforcement agencies and the industry in a broader way.IDGNS: How realistic is it to expect a site like Facebook, which has about 60 million active users, to properly monitor what so many people are doing to prevent inappropriate or illegal behavior?Kelly: We use very sophisticated social designs in terms of limiting access to people&#39;s information based on networks that they share in their real-world lives, and further, we use technology to look for anomalous behavior, things that may be concerning. It helps to keep our users safer and also to prevent spam and to create a more comfortable environment for our users. We have a pretty large customer service team that deals with both reports and with the potentially anomalous behavior highlighted by the technology.IDGNS: Have you improved your response times when members report complaints about content or actions on the site? That seemed to be a big complaint Attorney General Cuomo&#39;s office had with Facebook at some point.Kelly: Yes, absolutely.IDGNS: Does Facebook do enough to make sure its average member understands how to manage the very granular privacy settings you offer?Kelly: I think the average Facebook user understands very well that we take privacy extraordinarily seriously. There&#39;s always a balance to be struck between the ease of use and completeness in providing privacy control. We try to strike that balance very well, but we always listen to user feedback about that in terms of how we give them more control over what information they share and with whom.IDGNS: How much monitoring do you do of, say, photos or videos uploaded to the site? Do those go through automated screening, or do you depend more on members manually flagging stuff they see?Kelly: Most of the automated tools we&#39;ve tested in terms of recognizing inappropriate images and things like that are ineffective. We&#39;ve found that users are some of the best reporters on that, and our reporting infrastructure is extraordinarily effective in removing inappropriate content quickly and in holding those users who attempt to post them responsible by cutting off their account.IDGNS: As chief privacy officer, what are some of your goals for this year?Kelly: As the site and the Internet as a whole evolve, we want to continue giving people a great deal of control over what personal information they share and with whom. We want to continue to reflect the social graph very accurately, and privacy is a critical part of that, so we&#39;ll continue to bake it into the design of the site and provide people with the most effective privacy controls on the Internet.
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Facebook, the social-network site that has enjoyed explosive growth in new members over the past three months, said it plans to let users tell the rest of the world how to find them on the site.
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Facebook has made a move to allow applications created on its site to run on other Web sites.The social network&#39;s new JavaScript client library, released on Friday, ends the restriction that prevented developers from running Facebook applications on other Web sites, the company announced.&quot;Since the library does not require any server-side code on your server, you can now create a Facebook application that can be hosted on any Web site that serves static HTML,&quot; wrote Facebook&#39;s Wei Zhu on the company&#39;s developers blog.Nick O&#39;Neill, a blogger at All Facebook, noted that Facebook&#39;s move to let developers extend its platform to outside sites is a significant one for the company.&quot;The public is now aware of the possibilities to leverage Facebook outside of the main site and that is big news,&quot; he wrote. &quot;Rather than building your applications strictly within Facebook, you can now extend the full functionality of the platform to your own Web site and leverage Facebook as the tool for managing members and their relationships. Want to build your own social gaming platform that resides on your own Web site but leverages the power of users&#39; Facebook relationships? Now you can!&quot;Sean Aune, a blogger at Mashable, noted that the move means that Facebook applications &quot;could possibly start popping up on ordinary Web sites and blogs any day now.&quot;Aune added that Facebook is looking to stem criticism for being like a &quot;walled garden in that things do go in but nothing comes out. It would appear that they made the first step last night in &#39;coming out&#39; as it were. Web apps will be able to use cookies to track the users when they are using the app in other places on the Internet. So, in theory, you could play a game on any site and your stats will still be tracked.&quot;Computerworld is an InfoWorld affiliate.
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Ask.com will soon give its users the option to decide whether or not their search history is retained by the site.
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(InfoWorld) - Many Web developers these days feel a sleep-depriving mix of unbridled enthusiasm and nagging concern over Facebook's social-networking platform. Opened to external developers three months ago, the Facebook platform and tools are well designed and offer developers generous revenue opportunities rare among social networks, along with a fast-growing and deeply engaged community of people. However, this paradise is already getting soiled by developers who, eager to spur the adoption of their applications, design them with self-promotion features that many say are deceitful and trigger annoying and abusive actions,Â such asÂ bulk unsolicited e-mails and intrusive message displays. Although Facebook has acknowledged the problems and in recent weeksÂ outlined corrective measures, it's critical for the company to quickly tighten its rules and unleash stricter penalties, developers say. "It's definitely a problem that needs to be solved. There are additional steps Facebook could and should take," said Ali Partovi, CEO of iLike, which rebuilt its music-discovery site within Facebook in May. As things stand now, the situation is a cat-and-mouse game, with developers seeking and exploiting loopholes in its terms of service and the company plugging them after the fact, he said. By then, however, the damage is done, and the developer who exploited the loophole boosted adoption of his application, to the detriment of competitors who respect the terms' spirit, Partovi said. That prompts honest developers to look for the next loophole as a defensive competitive measure. "That creates an unnecessarily bad environment," he said. "If the rules were simply enforced with clearer penalties, these companies would all fall into line quickly." Partovi said his company has been watching this situation from the sidelines, because, in its category, iLike has a dominant position and feels little competitive pressure. But he sympathizes with developers embroiled in competition with each other. "When you see your direct competitor exploiting a loophole and growing very rapidly and beating you, it's hard to resist the temptation," he said. "To some extent the blame is on Facebook." This comes from someone who otherwise couldn't be happier with the Facebook platform and with the effect it has had on his company. In just three months, the iLike Facebook application has close to 7 million users, almost twice as many as on the company's own Web site, leading to a doubling of the company's revenue, Partovi said. Unlike other social-networking sites, which limit the revenue-generating capabilities of external applications, Facebook has a policy widely considered generous, letting development companies run ads and engage in other commercial activities. This has contributed greatly to the attractiveness of the platform for developers. At press time, Facebook's directory showedÂ more thanÂ 3,500 applications built for the site by outside developers. "The monetization is one of the most unique things they are doing," said Tim O'Shaughnessy, a co-founder and partner at Hungry Machine, which has developed about 15 Facebook applications. "That's what's causing the fervor over the application development. People are looking at the potential to enhance their business. It's not just a distribution play. It can put real dollars in your pocket." Joseph Aigboboh, co-founder of J-Squared Media,Â another Facebook developer, agreed. "Facebook has created an opportunity to build literally any product and spread it virally to achieve unprecedented rates of growth and retention. This means that with a relatively cheap budget, companies can build lucrative products and services [and] drive revenue," he wrote in an e-mail. It's no surprise then that some developers have been overeager in their attempts to boost adoption of their applications and generate revenue, while looking for ways to bend the rules. This week, Dave Morin, Facebook's senior platform manager, addressed the concerns about annoying and abusive applications in an official blog posting, and announcedÂ steps have already been taken, with more coming. Facebook wants the popularity of applications determined by how useful and entertaining they are. Thus, it's shifting how it measures application popularity in its applications directory away from total users and toward user engagement, he wrote. Vowing to protect members' experiences on the site, he said the latest release of the Facebook Markup Language -- version 1.1 -- changes how profile boxes display content, removing applications' ability to display profile content to visitors and hide it from profile owners. The company is also limiting applications' ability to contact members to crack down on spamming of deceptive and misleading notifications. Facebook's user experience has traditionally been considered significantly more elegant, controlled, and organized than the one from key rival and social-networking leader MySpace. Although MySpace remains more popular, Facebook has been gaining momentum for the past 12 months. Its user ranks have ballooned to 37 million active users today from 12 million in December.Â More thanÂ half of its active members return to the site daily. A company called Slide, which creates "widget" applications for social-networking sites and is big on MySpace, jumped on the chance to set up shop on Facebook, which has quickly become one of its most important platforms. Although Slide has created some of the most popular Facebook applications, its detractors have criticized it for engaging in some of the inappropriate tactics flagged by Morin. But Slide's CFO Kevin Freedman said that Slide is as interested as anyone else in providing a good user experience on Facebook and elsewhere. "We listen to our users' feedback first and foremost. Regarding some of those [critical] comments, we haven't necessarily seen the same response from our users and that's really what drives us," Freedman said. Chris Kirkland, CEO of MrKirkland.com, a Web design and development firm, has created three applications for Facebook, but has been unimpressed with the developer program. "I very much consider Facebook to be 'learning on the job' with the development platform," Kirkland wrote in an e-mail. The tools and resources Facebook provides to developers could be better, he wrote. "Overall we have been extremely disappointed. The documentation is reasonable, though sometimes inaccurate, but by far our main complaint is the diabolically poor level of communication. We have a feeling that we are dealing with a bunch of overbusy college kids," Kirkland wrote. He blames this lack of communication for a situation that led Facebook to yank one of his company's applications from the site with, he says, nary an explanation and, in his view, without justification. The application, designed to let members track visits to their profiles, received initial approval from Facebook, but then the company turned around and banned it because it lacked a feature Kirkland says they never told him would be required. He's fuming that a similar application from a competitor continues on the site. "We were given no opportunity to alter the application, no warnings that they would do this, and my attempts at discussing the erroneous TOS reports with Facebook merely received generic replies," he wrote. Aigboboh, of J-Squared Media,Â also sees room for improvement in communicating with developers. "The main issue we see is that Facebook doesn't allow its developer community to interact with Facebook itself very well," he wrote, adding that he suspects Facebook is aware of this and working to correct it. On a related matter, Hungry Machine's O'Shaughnessy, echoing others interviewed, said Facebook could also do a better job of giving developers advance notice of changes on the platform back end that require applications to be adjusted. Ultimately, most developers interviewed said they hope Facebook will rein in the overeager developers and smooth the other wrinkles in the program. "The platform is still very young. As it matures, it'll get more robust and problems we experience today will start to go away," O'Shaughnessy says. "For the stage at which the platform is, we're pretty happy with it." "The people behind the Facebook platform are very smart. I'm confident they will take more steps to improve this," iLike's Partovi said. "It's like the Wild West now, but I don't think [the abuses] will last very long." Facebook didn't respond to several requests seeking comment for this story.
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Insecure and antisocial networking A popular Facebook application that promises users privacy in exchange for opinions on their friends is acting as a stooly by offering the information for others to buy.â¦
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Facebook's application platform could be the next battleground in the privacy wars. Will Facebook fold and finally respect user privacy?
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Answer yes or no. This new social-networking site is based upon your responses to all kinds of questions
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The online hangout Facebook is opening another window to the outside world, letting nonusers for the first time search for members' personal profile pages.
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There is no question that the popular social networking site is taking over all aspects of our lives. As this new era dawns, it is important to keep in mind certain principles of etiquette. Firstly, Poke with caution and moderation.
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By ANICK JESDANUN The Associated Press; Staff writer Joe Killian contributed to this report.  NEW YORK __ The operators of the online hangout Facebook wanted to help users save time by highlighting changes their friends make to their personal profile pages.
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Company reps keep the flaw secret Facebook users who type sensitive information into a site feature known as Notes may be interested in knowing that it is currently experiencing a bug that allows documents designated as private to be read anyway.â¦
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Facebook wants to make its members' profiles portable, get a handle on software developers, launch ad platform.
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By ANICK JESDANUN, Associated Press writer  NEW YORK  Users of the online hangout Facebook revolted and won as the site agreed Friday to let them turn off a new feature that drew privacy complaints because it lets others easily see changes made to their personal profile pages.
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Social-networking Web site Facebook  said on Tuesday it has expanded to enable anyone with a valid  email address to join the service.