Diaspora

Roger sent me the link to THIS N.Y. TIMES STORY about a group of four young programmers trying to create a higher-privacy alternative to Facebook, which they are calling Diaspora. If they know what they’re doing, they’ll probably succeed.

As readers of this blog know, Facebook finally pushed me too far yesterday, and when I saw two separate negative articles in newspapers about how lots of people are feeling pushed too far by them, I started thinking “it’s not just me; this organization really has no respect for privacy whatsoever.” So I quit, and will stay quit.

Let me first say what is not my reason for quitting Facebook. I don’t care that they’re selling my information to marketers. I realize it’s nearly obligatory in intellectual circles now to denounce everything having to do with marketing, advertising, etc. But:

(a) companies selling information to mailing lists has been going on since long before the cyber-era

(b) they do have to stay in business somehow, and one usually expects that to be the way

(c) not all marketing is unwelcome anyway; for instance, Amazon’s purchase recommendations to me have become increasingly sophisticated and appropriate over time

No, I have two other reasons for quitting. The main one simply reached “last straw” stage yesterday. If I’m going to put information on Facebook, I want to be the one who decides where I’m putting it and where I’m not putting it. But that doesn’t seem to be the way Facebook wants to do it. They smear your information all over their site and other sites. It’s ridiculous.

First, I saw personal posts showing up on Google some months ago, until I figured out how to block that from happening.

Then yesterday, after class, one of my students said a new “author page” was up for me on Facebook. It’s still small, not many fans. But what really shocked me was the “related posts” section at the bottom of the page, which included all of my most recent personal posts. Anyone who “likes” me as an author automatically gets to see everything I post to all friends and family on Facebook. (And also the posts of another poor guy with my same first and last name who has nothing to do with me, except being on each other’s friends lists just for the heck of it.) OK, there’s probably some way to shut this option off too. But the point is, Facebook obviously cannot be trusted to keep your information private until requested otherwise. Their default mode is to spread your information everywhere no matter what. And yesterday it finally became too much.

My second main complaint about Facebook has been building for a couple of years, and that is its excessive overlapping of all the many different circles to which each of us belongs. Initially, I was invited onto the site by a number of my Egyptian ex-students: say, 25- and 26-year-olds who missed the good old days of AUC and wanted to say hi and hear how I was doing. That’s who it was exclusively for maybe 8 or 10 months.

And then, you all remember what happened next. Facebook started spreading into older demographic groups. I think the next group to join my Friends list was professional colleagues/friends from around the world. Already, this created a slight awkwardness, because it was shop talk with them and more just friendly chatter and life news with my ex-students.

Then my family members. And of course, one doesn’t necessarily want to share all information equally with all members of one’s family. Yet there are also consequences if you refuse a friend request from a family member, so it’s a real dilemma.

After that, my long lost high school classmates started showing up in droves. And then it was sort of fringe high school acquaintances showing up, and you sort of want to hear about how they’re doing and letting them join your Friends list seems like a good way to find out.

Unfortunately, the further your Friends list drifts away from close friends, the less you are able to predict whether their standards of wall behavior will be appropriate. I had one person make a major indiscretion on that wall and it was up for God knows how long before I deleted it (well, I know too: about half an hour; but only God knows how many people read it in the meantime). Other people seem to think very off-color jokes are appropriate even though by now my Friends list included people such as my mother, both of my brothers, my 14-year-old nephew, several cousins, and a number of fairly strictly religious people. And you have no control over that, and have to check your wall fairly carefully to make sure no one says something utterly outrageous that has to be cleansed quickly.

By the end, I was even accepting friends of friends of friends for my Friends list, or basically anyone whose mutual friends with me were people I like, on the assumption that we’d probably like the same people. But again, I’ve never heard of many of these people and have no idea what, personality-wise, they are capable of saying on my wall. You can always grant “limited access,” sure, but that’s insulting to them.

And I initially had a rule that no current students were allowed on my Friends list, but by the end, the things I was allowed to say on my own wall without offending any of my constituencies were so limited and banal anyway that it seemed the worse of two evils to reject invitations from current students. By the end, pretty much anyone was getting on the list, unless they had actively offended me recently.

With that many friends on your list, there’s no way to avoid offending someone. Even a stray dig at Sarah Palin (whom I viscerally despise; sorry if that’s too predictable, but it’s really deeply visceral in this case) managed to offend a few Christian conservative friends of mine. There was simply no remaining leeway to say much of anything anymore.

Other problems… People starting to send you Facebook messages rather than emails. Much harder to save and even to access. Even to notice, in fact.

People tagging you in photos without your permission, and those photos showing up on Google before you have a chance to detag them, if that’s the right verb.

Another problem I’ve had… People staying in touch with me less because they feel like they get all of my news from looking at my Facebook wall anyway.

Oh yes– it also automatically becomes an addiction. You have to check Facebook constantly: out of general curiosity, out of wondering whether any messages arrived for you, wanting to see if anyone commented on any of your status updates, seeing if there are new friend requests, and so on. It has a major impact on your lifestyle, and not a good one.

In short, in retrospect, isn’t it obviously a terrible idea to gather everyone you know or have loosely met in a single place where you can’t stop any of them from saying anything they want about you with all the rest of them listening? I mean, the chances of something extremely ridiculous happening in that situation are very high. And yesterday I asked myself yet again: what is the real benefit of it?

Facebook was fun back in 2007/08 when it was still sort of raggedy, and the participation rate spotty enough that it was a neat little unique bond to have with someone to be their Facebook friend. But we are now at Evil Panopticon stage with that site.