Facebook used to be a site that I visited when I was bored or had downtime. It was a diversion that could be accessed at any given moment, and then put back away when it’s purpose was served. The problem is that now, you can’t put Facebook away. You can close your browser window and continue on to surf other sites, but no matter where you go, you’re back at Facebook again. If I’m reading an article on cnn.com, my friends’ comments are listed to the right of the article. If I’m visiting (seemingly) random blogs, I’m being encouraged to be the first of my friends to “Like” the posting. Enough. I’m unplugging from the Facebook version of The Matrix.

The development community seems to have mixed feelings about the recent facebook changes, and the perceived intentions behind them. Some think that it is an inevitable future, and that we are all going to be issued national ID cards with our Facebook profile ID listed. Others don’t like the changes, but still see a world where Facebook becomes the only dominant player. I see it playing out a bit differently. I think the recent changes and initiatives that are coming out of Facebook are the beginning of the end for the giant. I, for one, am closing my Facebook account today, and I suspect that others will begin to do the same, for the following reasons:

• People like to feel like they have “choice” on the internet. Being herded through your online experience by endless recommendations and “you-may-also-likes” takes the excitement out of discovering anything, and leaves people with the feeling that every aspect of their online experience is orchestrated.
• People are boring. I don’t care what my facebook friend said about some article on [insert site name here]. If I wanted to get their view, I would have asked them or, gone to facebook.
• People always come to hate the king. Ask Microsoft, AOL, and Google. As something grows increasingly in strength and reach, people grow uneasy. For me, personally, seeing Facebook “Like” buttons on every website I visit is becoming maddening.

To those that stay, good luck, enjoy the experience. I hope your farms, fishtanks, and mafia families thrive.  And I hope you enjoy the customized Gillete advertisements.  My buddy Carlos did.  For everybody else, I’ll see you outside of Facebook, where I’ll be working on a browser plugin to block the various Facebook “Like/Comment/Recommend/Blah/Blah/Blah” widgets.

Facebook’s recent modifications to their privacy policies is causing concern for a lot of people, and for good reason. Facebook is encouraging third-party sites and developers to leverage their developer platform to gain deliver a more social experience for their users.  Facebook is referring to this new practice as “Instant Personalization”, and it means that  sites will be able to pull profile information about their visitors, as well as about the visitor’s friends.  That last sentence deserves some attention because it is possibly one of the bigger threats to privacy that I have seen done out-in-the-open on the web.

Essentially what this means is that if your friend visits a site that you have no affiliation with whatsoever, that friend can pass your personal information on to that site.  Meaning that whatever permission that you had previously extended to your friend to use your profile details have now been extended to a site with which you have no affiliation, and with whom you have no knowledge.

This attempted increase in reach is startling.  Not starting because Facebook is doing it (research has shown that adding personal information to advertisements results in significantly higher click-thru) but startling because it’s being allowed in the first place.  Google received FAR more attention for their Buzz Privacy Snafu, and that was a much smaller risk to my privacy than what Facebook is attempting.

I’ve considered leaving Facebook altogether (and I still may) I have deactivated my Facebook account as more and more of these privacy violations have surfaced. Below, I detail some of the steps necessary for setting your privacy preferences to prevent “New Instant Personalization”

Select Applications and Websites

Choose Edit Settings under Instant Personalization

Uncheck the “Allow select partners…” checkbox

Uncheck the Allow select partners... checkbox

Confirm that you are sure you want to disallow instant personalization

Confirm your selection

Go back to the privacy setting screen and edit what your friends can share about you

"Edit Settings" for what your friends can share about you

Uncheck all of the things that you don’t want your friends sharing about you

Uncheck what personal information you don't want your facebook friends to share about you

These issues will continue to surface.  As long as people are not actively protecting their privacy, and as long as sites can get higher click thru by posting and sharing personal information, your privacy is at risk.

Hailed by technology evangelists, and feared by privacy advocates, location based social networking apps are popping up on Facebook and Twitter faster than weeds in my front yard.  The apps themselves don’t offend me, they seem to be reasonably attractive, and Lord knows there are enough of them to choose from (loopt, foursquare, check.in, etc.)  I’m not even that worried about the privacy aspect (http://robmenow.com/)   What concerns (depresses) me more is the continuing devolution of communication.   The trend toward grunting is depressing:

• Writing letters to a friend “Dear Madam,—I have been shown in the files of the War…”
  • Sending instant messages to your friend “Josh: You going to the game tonight?”
    • Tweeting (or status updating) “I hate Mondays, but I had a great weekend”
      • Checking-in “I’m here”

It’s difficult to imagine this devolving any further, as we have now reduced communication from the written word to simply pushing a button that tells people your geographic location. “I’m here”  ”now I’m here”  ”now I’m somewhere else”

I’m sure there are some that are using these things to realize their potential (i.e. using it to post information or reviews about a location; getting discounts and bonus offers from participating businesses) but that is the (rare) exception and not the rule.  Will these services mature into something that is genuinely useful?  Or are they an idea that was good on paper, but ultimately fails to reach it’s potential.  I’m betting on the latter, but hoping for the former.

If you’ve been spending any time online over the past year, then you’ve undoubtedly noticed a disturbing trend.  With the ubiquity of social networking, people are less likely to be concerned with what information they expose online.  They have the illusion that they are sharing information with a select group of friends, and that gives them a level of comfort that is unwarranted.  In the past few years, it has been fairly common to hear in the news about people losing jobs/relationships/reputations over things that they (or others) post about themselves online.

As can be expected, there are elements out there that have found a way to monetize this lack of caution.  Recently a disturbing number of “online directories” have surfaced that allow you to search for people online.  These sites all tend to have the same aggregated data; littered with equal part accurate details and complete errors.

Hand-in-hand with these online directories comes their more disturbing counterpart.  I was recently warned about spokeo.com from a few friends on facebook.  This site attempts to monetize not only the voyeurs who want to buy information about somebody else, but also those who want to remove information about themselves.  When you go to the privacy section of the site, you are greeted with a very reassuring promo for ReputationDefender, who promises to (for a small fee) keep your online reputation safe.

Does anybody else feel like this is becoming a mob-protection racket?  It is not hard to envision a company starting up two branches.  This branch offers to protect your online reputation, while the other branch actively attempts to compromise or damage your online reputation.  On the surface it seems like one is the enemy of the other; cops vs robbers, good guys vs bad, Daniel San vs Cobra Khai, but it’s not.  These companies are working hand-in-hand; both profiting by exposing as much compromising information as they can possible find (or in some cases, make up).  Most search engines profit by being more accurate.  The opposite is actually true in this case.  These companies don’t need accuracy; in fact if they can post a profile that is identifiable as YOU, but accidentally include an error that is particularly scandalous; they profit more!   Given that they are merely ”aggregating” this data, they can wash their hands of any responsibility for ensuring it’s accuracy.

Hopefully people will become more aware of these protection-style schemes.  I hope that this encourages people to shore up their online privacy, and to demand that the services they use do the same.  I also hope that pressure is put on these companies that prevents them from profiting from something that would be illegal in the real world.