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update 16:00: Steve Jobs answers to my open letter, see below.
Dear Steve Jobs,
Having read your Thoughts on Flash, I could not agree with you more. Flash is not the Web, and I am glad Apple seizes the opportunity of open standards to build better products for their customers.
But I am not so sure about your definition of the word Open in general. I will not argue here that it is ironic you find the Apple Store more open than Flash. I will not complain either that you like Openness so much that when you use “Open Source” Software to build your Mac operating system, you keep all the openness for yourself and don’t give it to your customers, nor to the developers whose works have been very useful to you.
I figured that writing an open letter was an appropriate way to remind you of a couple of things that you may have forgotten — maybe in good faith — about open standards.
It is true that HTML5 is an emerging open standard, and I am glad that you adopted it (well, did you really have the choice anyway?). However I have to say I am impressed in the way you succeed in saying how Apple has been doing great with open standards against Flash… while explaining Flash videos is not a problem, because Apple has implemented another video codec: H.264.
May I remind you that H.264 is not an open standard? This video codec is covered by patents, and “vendors and commercial users of products which make use of H.264/AVC are expected to pay patent licensing royalties for the patented technology” (ref). This is why Mozilla Firefox and Opera have not adopted this video codec for their HTML5 implementation, and decided to chose Theora as a sustainable and open alternative.
Free Software Foundation Europe have been raising consensus and awareness on Open Standards for some years already. I am sure we would be happy to help Apple make the good decision. So, to begin with, here is the definition:
An Open Standard refers to a format or protocol that is
- subject to full public assessment and use without constraints in a manner equally available to all parties;
- without any components or extensions that have dependencies on formats or protocols that do not meet the definition of an Open Standard themselves;
- free from legal or technical clauses that limit its utilisation by any party or in any business model;
- managed and further developed independently of any single vendor in a process open to the equal participation of competitors and third parties;
- available in multiple complete implementations by competing vendors, or as a complete implementation equally available to all parties.
Hugo Roy
April 2010
Steve Jobs’ email (with sources)
From: Steve Jobs
To: Hugo Roy
Subject: Re:Open letter to Steve Jobs: Thoughts on Flash
Date 30/04/2010 15:21:17
All video codecs are covered by patents. A patent pool is being assembled to go after Theora and other “open source” codecs now. Unfortunately, just because something is open source, it doesn’t mean or guarantee that it doesn’t infringe on others patents. An open standard is different from being royalty free or open source.
Sent from my iPad
Since it was an open letter, I think I have the right to publish his answer.
Today with the first public release of ACTA, the effects the international agreement will have on Free Software appear to be dangerous for its development and its distribution. First, by extending infringements proceedings and criminal offences to a broad scope of “intellectual property” including software patents. Second, by destabilizing the most important means of distribution for Free Software, which relies on an open and neutral platform on which online services are not meant to control whether “intellectual property rights” (including patents) are infringed. Third, by strengthening the protection of Digital Restrictions Managements (DRMs) against Free Software and fair competition.
Earlier today, the European Commission’s Directorate-General for Trade published the first public version of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, aka ACTA (PDF). However this document does not give the details on the negotiations, which began secretly in October 2007. I will not speak here about the political damages ACTA inflicts to the respect of democracy, nor about the disastrous effects ACTA will have directly on free speech, privacy, and the internet ecosystem’s sustainability as an open, neutral and innovative platform.
Instead, I want to focus here on the direct and indirect threats ACTA represents for Free Software, on its development, its legal viability and on its business and trade related aspects.
First, let’s set things straight. ACTA is not just about counterfeiting, it is broader than copyright. The scope of ACTA is, as defined in the public release:
intellectual property refers to all categories of intellectual property that are the subject of Sections 1 through 7 of Part II of the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights.
This includes copyright, trademark, industrial design and patent. If this definition is clear, all along the text paragraphs refers sometimes only to copyright and trademark, and sometimes to a broader scope, depending on how the negotiations will evolve over time. In this case, we know that the threats to Free Software are multiple because of the software patents granted every year by the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) and the licensing schemes tied with patents that are incompatible with Free Software (To know more about software patents in ACTA, read End Software Patents).
Second, ACTA is not a trade agreement. Whatever the EU negotiators claim, the fact is that ACTA goes beyond current legislations and aims at creating internationally harmonized legislations on how “intellectual property rights” should be enforced. This is one of the reason why ACTA is creating its own body (the Committee) with its own executives (the Secretariat), independently from the World Trade Organization within which international trade agreements should be negotiated, and independently from World Intellectual Property Organization within which international treaties dealing with copyright, trademark and patents are usually negotiated (and open to NGOs like FSFE). The threat to Free Software is that there is absolutely no safeguards as to how the principles of freedom and sharing software would be kept intact.
What ACTA does is creating civil enforcement procedures harming Free Software development and distribution. Indeed, this is the other side effect of the changes in judicial authorities and civil proceedings regarding “intellectual property rights.” Free Software is an important milestone of an open and neutral Internet, and the Internet itself is a core tool of how Free Software is developed (by allowing developers to contribute to code and create programs around the world) and how Free Software is distributed (with online services, including multiple protocols such as peer to peer protocols among others). All this system is threatened by ACTA with such measures and propositions as:
prevent infringing goods [infringing any intellectual property right, including patent] from entering the channels of commerce [...]
injunction against intermediaries whose services are used by third party to infringe an intellectual property right [...]
These measures create a risk for online service providers and web services, because it makes them responsible for infringements and so encourages them to monitor, filter, control and censor their services — which has always been proved to diminish the incentive for innovation, tinkering and hacking; possibilities required to develop Free Software. Also, ACTA
promotes the development of mutually supportive relationships between online services providers and right holders to deal effectively with patents, industrial design, trademark and copyright or related rights infringement which takes place by means of the Internet [...]
Which itself is a danger to network neutrality because it creates more concentration between ISPs, operators and rights holders, but also it is a direct threat to Free Software because the major means of distribution are controlled, supportively by rights holders including software patents holders.
Above these procedures, ACTA goes where the EU Directive IPRED2 attempted to: criminal enforcement, which includes “Inciting, Aidind and Abetting”. Of course, this concerns “Technological Enforcement of Intellectual Property in the Digital Environment”, extending the scope of IPRED.
What’s more, Free Software itself, and not only the means of its distribution, is targeted:
These shall apply to:] [...] the manufacture, importation, or circulation of a [technology], service, device, product, [component, or part thereof, that is: [marketed] or primarily designed or produced for the purpose of circumventing an effective technological measure; or that has only a limited commercially significant purpose or use other than circumventing an effective technological measure.]
Finally, ACTA endangers Free Software by protecting Digital Restrictions Management and proposing civil remedies against removing or altering DRMs, or
distribute, import for distribution, broadcast, communicate, or make available to the public copies of works, knowing that electronic rights management information has been removed or altered without authority
Not only ACTA is a direct and indrect threat to Free Software, it is also an important step backward to less freedom and towards a dogmatic approach of “intellectual property” that will harm the sharing of knowledge and the Free Software values, by
Promoting the culture of intellectual property [...]
To support, developing countries efforts, for the implementation of the Agreement and the integration of anti-counterfeiting and anti-hacking actions in national development strategies.
(If you want to help, spread the word about ACTA and contribute to the comments of the public release).
On Wednesday at Re:Publica, Jeff Jarvis gave a talk on the German Paradox, a concept he introduced on his blog, BuzzMachine. A blog post that journalist Jean-Marc Manach already commented (for those of you who read French). Looking at Jeff Jarvis’ experience is interesting: by talking publicly about his prostate cancer on his blog, he got a lot of valuable information that helped him make important choices. As a result, he argues that we don’t see all the benefits of “publicness.”
Our culture and our social norms have trained us to be secret about our private life. For Jeff Jarvis, this is stronger in Germany than in the US. There is a cultural aspect of privacy. But is it really a good thing? Maybe we talk about privacy too much, and the issue is elsewhere. Furthermore, generations don’t all share the same perception of what privacy is. Jean-Marc Manach has described the differences in his article Privacy, a Problem for old fools? (in French).
And Privacy is indeed full of paradoxes. I see at least two of them:
- I have been filmed and taken into pictures by my parents, by my family and then by my friends, since even before I was born. You can find a video, somewhere in my house, of an echography of me, my little brother and my little sister. With digital cameras, people now take pictures of everything and they take thousands of pictures. And people share them and show them to other friends or relatives. Then, why are so many people bothered when we, young people, share the pictures of ourselves with our friends?
- However, among my own generation, there is this paradox of privacy, that we are willing to share more content, with more people. And yet, every time something is happening online (Facebook changes some settings, Google Buzz launches, etc) we have tons of people claiming that peoples’ privacy is being violated.
What’s important if one wants to understand what’s happening here, is to ask the appropriate questions. Who is sharing with whom? What kind of tools (and tools implies control)? Who is benefiting from these social practices, and who would benefit from their changes?
Every once in a while, we have some people claiming that privacy is dead, it does not make sense anymore. Ethnologist and sociologist Danah Boyd has an excellent overview of the situation (emphasis is mine):
No matter how many times a privileged straight white male technology executive pronounces the death of privacy, Privacy Is Not Dead. People of all ages care deeply about privacy. And they care just as much about privacy online as they do offline. But what privacy means may not be what you think.
Fundamentally, privacy is about having control over how information flows. It’s about being able to understand the social setting in order to behave appropriately. To do so, people must trust their interpretation of the context, including the people in the room and the architecture that defines the setting. When they feel as though control has been taken away from them or when they lack the control they need to do the right thing, they scream privacy foul.
On the other hand, there are also people who are fundamentally taking the opposite direction and always complain about anything like it is a huge scandal and that people’s privacy is violated at least as much as in Stasi’s Germany. Examples: Google Street View would be a big violation of privacy. Or body scanners in airports would be a violation of privacy (although I am not saying it is a good thing) Also, sometimes cultural differences make situations even stranger: e.g. in saunas in Germany, people have no problem showing their “private” parts–which is not the case in the US.
Anyway, this category of privacy-alarmists have been described by The Tech Liberation Front (emphasis is mine):
I think that it’s clear there is such a thing as a “privacy paternalist”—and there are not a few among folks I consider allies on other issues. They’re the ones who are convinced that anyone who values privacy less highly than they do must be confused or irrational. A genuine privacy paternalist will say that even if almost everyone understands that Amazon keeps track of their purchases to make useful recommendations, this collection must be prohibited because they’re not thinking clearly about what this really means and may someday regret it.
There’s actually a variant on this view that I won’t go into at length, but which I don’t think should be classed as strictly paternalist. Call this the “Prisoner’s Dilemma” view of privacy. On this account, there are systemic consequences to information sharing, such that we each get some benefit from participating in certain systems of disclosure, but would all be better off if nobody did.
So in all that, the question that we must ask is not so much about privacy, but about publicity. And in this matter, I am grateful for the direction Jeff Jarvis have taken in his talk at Re:Publica: the benefits of publicness (and in the meantime, I would like the discussions on Privacy to focus really on privacy problems–but that’s for another blog post).
Taking his American view of Germany, Jeff Jarvis then make this interesting finding (if someone have sources and figures for that, please drop me an email): Why are there so few bloggers in Germany compared to the US? To what someone answered: “We lack a culture of sharing knowledge… and we mistrust the fools giving it away for free.”
That’s where the benefits of publicness rely: sharing knowledge and, indeed giving it away for free. But what does “free” mean here? I would like to think of Free as in Freedom, and by that I mean: give your knowledge and give others the rights to share it freely, like we do with software. However, some may think of free as in gratis. Which leads to the question of the price of privacy, or its costs (see Privacy is a currency). What’s important here is where the control is and who has it.
Unfortunately, today little control is given to the users, and most of it is centralized by Web services like Facebook, or Google’s. But Jeff Jarvis makes no mention of that.
Let’s get more focused on the value of publicness. We should not act like privacy paternalists. As he puts it, public should be the rule, private should be the exception. Danah Boyd had an interesting piece on the same logics: Public by default, Private when necessary. And similarly, I came up with the same advice when talking about Facebook, that it is silly to put everything “as private” but that people should accept the rules of sharing and go more public.
The benefits are interesting, and the example Jeff Jarvis took, Flickr, is indeed a great example. By publishing on Flickr, an online community emerged where people could enjoy more pictures, and share knowledge on photographs, create groups, edit tags, making collaborative rankings and tidying, which now makes Flickr a very wide database of pictures (sometimes in creative commons). And so he concludes that, on the Internet, we should be like Germans in saunas and stop acting like Americans in saunas → The internet as a big global sauna where everyone would be naked and showing his/here private parts.
Wait a minute… Have I missed something here? Is there a part of the picture I don’t see?
I agree on the benefits of publicness, and the value of publicity. But it doesn’t mean that privacy and keeping things private is now meaningless. Because there are also the benefits of privateness and the value of privacy, in terms of social freedom and personal autonomy. And we have to keep that possible, and in some areas, we have to keep away publicity.
Follow Jeff Jarvis’ argument. Then, why wouldn’t I make my emails public? Why do I keep using emails anyway? I should just simply post Facebook messages! Is the reason why I am sending private emails that I have something to hide? No! But it doesn’t mean that I should make that public. Why? Because there is still a private sphere I want to protect. Here, the benefits of privateness overcome the benefits of publicness. Indeed, in a worldwide sauna Internet, everyone with a towel would be suspicious. And social pressure would be too high!
So how do we make sure that we don’t fall into this trap? How do we draw the line between the public sphere–which is where the benefits of publicness are more valuable than the benefits of privateness, and the private sphere, within which the benefits of privateness are more important than the benefits of publicness?
We have to make sure that the answer comes from the right people, because the benefits are not the same for everyone! For Facebook and Google, the benefits of publicness will always overcome the benefits of privateness, because they can’t monetize and advertize what is kept secret or private! But we have to make sure that people for whom the benefits of privateness are more valuable do not have too much power to decide on our private/public sphere either: because that is censorship.
I want to stay free to choose whether something should be public or kept private, and that choice must be protected. For that, control is essential, and privacy must be granular, not binary. But before that, to understand what is the better architecture of control, in which Free Software and the Neutral and Free Internet have a huge role. We have to give people back the power and the responsibility to decide where to draw the line between public and private. And for that, we need to make the distinction between communication, sharing, publishing.
Yesterday was the opening of re:publica, a 3-day conference in Berlin “focussed on blogs, social media and digital culture.” This year, the emphasis has been put on Network Neutrality among others, with no less than ten talks on the subject, including speakers like Jérémie Zimmermann, co-founder of La Quadrature du Net; or Tim Wu, one of the firsts who came up with the subject of Net Neutrality.
 But of course, there are many other interesting subjects, and yesterday one of the highlights was about privacy, or merely about publicity with, as a pretext, the “German Paradox” (yes, yet another paradox about privacy…). This paradox comes from the fact that Germany is culturally very meticulous on privacy issues, and yet Germans don’t have any problem showing their private parts in saunas.
Anyway, all that stuff raised a lot of interesting questions and concepts and I have taken so many notes, I’m sure some blog posts will come in the near future to give my views on them. Fortunately, if nothing big comes to my head within the next days (wish is unlikely to happen, since things are always on the move on the European Level about the Digital Agenda and Open Standards).
Finally, since I will argue about the “benefits of publicness” I decided to do something concrete there. I have now published a wide selections of my bookmarks, collected since 2008 on http://delicious.com/hugoroy. So, am I going to benefit from this publicness? Or am I being too public here? Of course, I can see some benefits: on the one hand, my bookmarks have “tags” depending on what people who have the same bookmark write there, so it makes my bookmark collection more relevant. On the other hand, some links are highly political and the reason I bookmark them is not necessarily because I support the opinions expressed there, sometimes it is the case, sometimes it is quite the contrary. Moreover, that collection gives a detailed overview of the subjects I follow, the sources I read the most… and this is a very valuable information on myself, that could as well turn against me.
I haven’t been quite talkative on this blog these last couple of months… (hey, for those of you who read French) but I can guarantee you I will be back! It is also that things are moving fast and it’s been hard to have a minute to blog! No possibility to get bored: things are happening at the European Commission especially with the battle for Open Standards and the Digital Agenda. What’s more, Document Freedom Day is now in 3 days, and with our fellows in Berlin we will thank Radio Stations adopting the Ogg Vorbis open standard. Finally, the annual workshop of the European Legal Network, maintained by FSFE, is coming near in Amsterdam! Lots of interesting topics, I’m sure I’ll find some time to give my views on them!
Oh, and I also have to do all this university work about my internship, which ends in 2 months déjà!
Mise à jour 23/03 : Une version consolidée de l’ACTA datant du 18 janvier vient d’être révélée par la Quadrature du Net. Retrouvez le document complet en téléchargement (pdf) ici.
J’aime penser que parmi les éléments qui forgent une génération, les luttes politiques sont au premier plan. Chaque génération a ses luttes politiques, ses nouveaux enjeux, de même que chaque jeunesse a ses différends avec les générations précédentes, et ces différends ont également beaucoup à voir avec la façon dont chacun s’exprime. Ainsi, certains problèmes, formulés de façons totalement différentes, peuvent apparaître sous des angles inédits, et parfois même être surpassés. Continue reading…
Google recently launched its new product, Google Buzz. There is no denying that it attempts to compete with Facebook and one has to say Google has good arguments there. Obviously, with the number of services Google provide to people, it makes a big amount of information to share. Interconnect everything, give it a name stolen from your competitor Yahoo!, add a cool Google logo and here you have Buzz.
And I have to say that, even if it is far from perfect and finished, it is not so bad technically. Its ability to centralize external data empowers this channel of sharing information (and add to that open APIs, it has a big potential).
But however, the buzz was not so much about technical qualities, but more about a social, even moral issue: privacy. It is outstanding to see how far Google has failed the start of Buzz. Privacy issues were raised very early, and for very good reasons. Making the followers list public was quite an irresponsible move, since it nearly meant making public the names of people to whom you send the more emails (in private).
The first consequences followed (see F*ck you, Google, the article by the Guardian.)
Google is widely responsible for that. Emails are part of private correspondence. Google would never have published the recipients of your emails. Although that’s what they did without noticing with Buzz lists (plus with all the content they automatically shared, e.g. from Google Reader.)
Wired has created an interesting survey: “What Buzzeth you About Google Buzz?”.
Nevertheless, I would like to remind something… including about this very answer (survey top #2 answer):
Breach of Trust
by Anonymous
I am a lawyer. The names of clients, witnesses, investigators, and expert witnesses are all confidential, and Google just breached the trust that my clients have in me to keep ALL of their information confidential. I signed up for email. Not social networking. We can no longer trust Google. They do not appreciate our privacy. Lawyers must immediately cease using Google provided services since they breach our client’s privacy.
First, this lawyer’s behaviour is very clumsy, if not irresponsible. When you have a moral (and professional) obligation to keep your conversations private, confidential and secure, you don’t give away this responsibility. But this lawyer did, by charging Google of this responsibility. Which reasons can explain that he could trust Google for that? What is the point of having all those laws about client-attorney secrecy, if the lasts give it away? It also reminds me of the story of this gun dealer from Belgium, busted easily by feds when Google gave his emails to the authorities.
I can admit that you can trust Gmail as your postman. In real life anyway you have to trust the guy who caries your message. However, you don’t give all your data to him, nor all the information, neither the whole responsibility of protecting your privacy. Trust means mutuality. Where is mutuality between you and big Google?
Second, mails and emails are one thing, all the information shared by Buzz are another. Once Buzz has centralized all the data Google can share about you, one suddenly wakes up and notices how much information he gave away. All this information is far from out of reach for Google, it is only a few clicks away, without you noticing, without even your control (or so little).
My opinion is that, on privacy concerns, Google’s nuisance power is only the power we, users, give to it, by giving away all our data and by giving up on protecting our own privacy (which is everyone’s responsibility).
Meanwhile, Facebook also goes on Google’s strategy. They launched their chat XMPP server, a big competitor for Google Talk. So, to be optimistic and positive, that make a lot more people using XMPP/Jabber, good news!
Translated from French: Google Buzz, départ manqué et vie privée.
Please give me your feedback on this draft article  It is intended for publication on FSFE.org so for now it is All Rights reserved.
Free Software is defined by four freedoms, and intends to create ethical relationships in the digital age of society, based on trust, responsibility and freedom.
In a world where we rely increasingly upon Information Technologies such as software and networks, it is important to realize software is more than code. The effects of programs go beyond the limited scope of developers, and contribute to shape our future.
The Free Software movement aims at making this future possible for everyone by ensuring fundamental principles of freedom for all, equally.
In order to achieve this goal, Richard M. Stallman defined four freedoms. At first sight however, these criteria are only valuable to hackers and developers. It is true that for most users access to source code does not seem important, neither do the rights to modify and publish improvements. The utility of software freedom is not obvious for all because only few have the capacity to enjoy hacking.
Free Software is valuable to society since it enables the emergence of a system, in the same perspective as Democracy. Democracy leads to the transformation of political systems, especially towards more freedom for all. However, in order to achieve this the political system goes through several steps before everyone value political rights. The fact that someone cannot enjoy the freedom given by the system does not mean he cannot enjoy its effects. To illustrate this, think of the process of an election.
The Constitution gives to every citizen over a certain age the right to be candidate in a political election. But it does not mean that everyone will, because only some citizens have the capacity and want to become politicians. Would you say that Democracy does not matter because you do not want to be in politics? No, the scope of Democracy is larger than just the election system. Whether you participate directly or not, you as a citizen enjoy the effects of freedom in your political system.
Quite the same distinction occurs in Free Software. Its licences grant rights to use, share, study and improve the program. But it does not mean that everyone will. These rights are fundamental for the software system because nothing stops you if you want to learn how software works or how to read source code. It depends on your own choice.
Thus, Free Software concurs to a system in which developers and users are equal and potential hackers. It results in a system in which freedom and equality are at core. That is also why Free Software is good for business and for education. Because if your creation is better than the competition, you are allowed to start yourself.
It is also important for education because Free Software gives everyone the right to read and understand source code. And this is a very important step toward a free society in the digital age, when technology will be even more invasive. It is important that more people are able to read and modify source code, so that it is not an extreme minority of people who shape the system for us.
This is a question of social control. What freedom will we have in a society of digital illiterates? Free Software enables people to be in control in digital society and gives the possibility to learn, to read and to write.
“Free Software, Free Society”
Doing an internship with FSFE is great! And you have a lot of things to do  Coffee can be a good friend sometimes…
By the way, I’m now in the middle of my internship already. Continue reading…
At last, privacy is becoming a hot issue, in a world where everyone is tracked by companies and by the State, and in which information is shared more easily through networks. We can now potentially share everything with the whole world in an instant. The Internet is now accessible by almost every mobile phone.
Obviously, the consequences are huge, not only technically, but also on our behaviour. Social practices evolve with technologies, so is our conception of privacy. We are now willing to show more, to publish more. For my generation, it seems like the complex of privacy or intimacy is now gone.
Or, is it?
Maybe not. Because in spite of all these practices of sharing almost everything on the Web, recently the issue of privacy has risen. Politicians in France came up with a “right to oblivion” which consists in allowing everyone a kind of absolute “property” on everything that is published by (or about) you on the Web.
But very recently, Facebook’s founder Mark Zuckerberg claimed:
“The Age of Privacy is Over”
ReadWriteWeb
This echoes the changes in privacy settings and privacy policy that Facebook has undertaken in December, for which a lot of people are complaining. They are now concerned about the respect of their privacy, after having published so much things.
It’s not that I’m particularly enjoying this trend towards less privacy and more publicity, I am myself a hardcore advocate of privacy (which is the reason why I use encryption for my emails and do not use Gmail). But however, I am really welcoming this change in the Facebook policy. Here’s why.
Let’s have a look at what happened. In the beginning of December, Facebook updated the privacy settings with new default options which were seen as less “protective with privacy.” Since a lot of people are using the default options, a lof of things published, which were intended to be accessible only to a restrictive list of people, called “friends;” suddenly went more public. Even Mark Zuckerberg’s pictures were then publicly available (and it was certainly not a mistake).
So how did we get there? What explains this strategic change at Facebook?
The first mistake was to even consider in the first place that there is such thing as privacy on Facebook.
Facebook is about sharing. The only major difference in its concept compared to other services like YouTube is that the sharing is not focused on content (YouTube is focused on videos), but it is focused on individuals. The way streams are organized is not as much on what is said, as to whom and by whom it is said.
Nevertheless that does not change the fact that whatever is shared, is public. It maybe to a restrictive audience in the first place, but it is public, especially when you have more than 50 “friends” (which is the case for almost everybody). So from there, I find it’s particularly incoherent to concern about privacy, because such a privacy is illusion and in contradiction with Facebook’s utility.
The argument that there was a kind of implicit agreement between Facebook and its users that what is published should be kept private is pure nonsense. It is true that in the beginning Facebook was only for students and so it was a restrictive enough network. But it is a long time since Facebook is not a Harvard community anymore. It’s now a worldwide company.
And like every company of this size, you do not control it, you do not own it. Behind, there are commercial incentives, and certainly not poeple without ulterior motives… People who used to think Facebook was compatible with privacy were wrong.
Because technically privacy needs certain rules and practices to be protected. Think of the issue of private communication (snail mails, emails, instant messaging). Why do you use an envelop when you send a letter? This is a technical measure you take in order to protect your own privacy.
On the Internet, we also have laws to protect privacy (or at least we try). The problem is that everyone forgot to take care of their own privacy. Why is almost nobody using encryption when sending an email?
On Facebook, such precautions cannot exist because you would not control them. And even when you think you are in control of your data, you are not. Because all your data are in their databases. You cannot trust them on that. You have no means to make sure that your privacy is respected. Moreover, it is nonsense to give up the respect of your privacy to others, even more to a business that is based on advertisement and marketing your data.
If you go on with trying to keep things private on Facebook, you will end up with problems every single time they change something. And since they don’t have a very strong business model right now, it is likely to change again. My feeling on this is that Facebook needs to be more open and tends to look like Twitter: more public, more audience, more information, more sharing… more advertisement.
My advice is that you should always keep in mind: everything you publish on the Internet will be public, especially when you don’t control your publication with your own trusted server. And whatever concerns your intimacy should not be on the public Web. You don’t need the Web to share your photos with true friends, you have emails or instant messaging (e.g. jabber).
Finally, if you want to enjoy social networks you have to accept the way it works. Like everything social, it can be the subject of social studies, or economic interests, or marketing. And what is social on the Web belongs to the public sphere. Your privacy does not belong to the public sphere. Accept that, and publish whatever you want with maximum openness and you will see how much you will enjoy websites like Facebook without being worried for your privacy.
This was previously published in French on my personal weblog.
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