Final Facebookery?

So, I’m standing on a precipice. Or a pinnacle, I’m not sure.

A Facebook precipice to be precise.

Yes, I have been very vocal in my opposition to Facebook, and curiously no-one has asked the question – why do you still use it?

My previous rants have been terribly minor rants – mostly about excess advertising, poor communication and spam.

This one, however, is much more serious. So serious, in fact, that I have been in communication with the Office of the Data ProtectionCommissioner in Ireland – where Facebook Europe is based.

Have you noticed the ‘share’ button? I noticed it a month or so ago – I mentioned it on here. What I didn’t realise is actually how scary a tiny little button that is. And here’s why…

I have around 15,000 photos on Facebook. All of these photos have been given the privacy setting “Friends only”. Fine, I thought. Then the ‘share’ button came out. I only found out about the ‘share’ button when my brother shared a photo of mine. No problem, I thought, my privacy settings are such that only mutual friends will be able to see it.

Not so.

Despite me specifying in the privacy settings that the photo could only be seen by friends of mine; Facebook has wantonly overridden this to allow anyone to see this – I found this out not because Facebook has communicated a change in policy to me; but when an unknown friend of my brother’s started commenting on my photo.

Now, this is massively concerning. This is in direct contravention of the licence I gave to Facebook when I uploaded my images – that they would only be visible to my friends. This is even more concerning because I cannot turn off the ‘share’ function. Essentially, it is possible that every single one of my over 15,000 photographs and countless status updates could be shared with the world at large by friends who have much lower privacy settings sharing my content.

The communication I have had with the ODPC has been reasonably fruitless. They haven’t actually treated the complaint with any degree of gravitas, merely flippantly dismissing it. The ODPC response? “You give consent to such processing as Facebook deems necessary by using the site and uploading the photographs.” The ODPC also claims that “Facebook provides clear information about how information is made available”.

Sorry?

No it doesn’t.

Firstly, any such ‘consent’ is lost in a highly confusing and contradictory privacy policy. It must be contradictory if privacy settings for ‘only friends’ include ‘friends of friends or whatever your friends’ privacy settings are’. Secondly Facebook is very poor about communicating the roll-out of new privacy policies. Finally, this has been applied retrospectively, so despite the new policy coming into force in December 2012, it applies all the way back to my first post in July 2007. Are they really asking that every time they change their policy (without telling me) that I trawl back through my history and change the settings of anything I am unhappy with?

That makes Facebook unusable.

According to ODPC, the only way to withdraw consent to such processing, is to withdraw from Facebook as a whole.

And as such I have taken a hiatus away from Facebook for a while. And it appears I’m not the only one – Facebook has lost 2m of its UKusers in the last 6 months. That’s over 6% of its 32m UK users.

So, why should I still use Facebook?

Well, it lets me share photos with my friends. After a weekend away I can upload a full album of my artistic genius (or drunken antics) and draw attention to specific friends by tagging them in it. Videos are starting to take off in the way too. Obviously the risk now is that I am sharing the photos with more than friends; but the alternatives here are poor – Instagram and Tumblr are more about individual photos than albums, Flickr is slightly better, but then it’s about encouraging people to go to your Flickr site which people check far less frequently – often when only uploading their own photos.

Secondly it seems to be the default for organising events. Whereas once events were organised by mobile or email, these days they are most frequently organised by Facebook. This is because all the contacts are in one place – there is no scurrying friends for email addresses of other people. Friends can add other people too, in case you can’t get or don’t know their contact details. And then the conversation can start – what the fancy dress theme will be, what the route of the pub-crawl should be. It saves emails pinging about; or people getting left off the list when someone accidentally hits ‘reply’ rather than ‘reply all’.

And that emphasises the third bonus – I can easily see what friends are up to by checking their timeline. I don’t need to email them seeing how they are; I can do so surreptitiously without them even knowing. It’s great for stalking keeping in contact with people like that. If I don’t know someone’s mobile number, I can message them on Facebook and, assuming they are a regular user, they will see it. Aside from regularly texting or emailing people to find out how they are (including old school friends who I really don’t care about) there is no other way of finding out how they are and what they are up to. Well, except Twitter, although my local friends are very very slow on the take-up of Twitter.

And that, primarily, is the problem identified with Flickr – getting people to be regular users of other technologies. It will happen. There are still a lot of my friends who have ‘dormant’ Facebook accounts – they post very little and, so far as I am aware, log on very little, so it clearly hasn’t ingrained it so indelibly in the national psyche as to be essential. And challengers are starting to take off – various messaging services allow you to send messages free in the way Facebook chat or messenger can; and to groups. My family use Google calendars to organise events and then email to communicate conversations relating to it; and yes, there are photo sharing sites. But it isn’t all in one place.

All of this leaves me with three choices:

Firstly, carry on using Facebook as I always did and just take the risk that people will share things – perhaps exercising a degree of caution over what I post and hoping that no-one will go through each of those 15,000 to find the one of my peeing against a fence at a festival.

Secondly, scour my profile. Remove everything or anything that could be a risk, and use the site as though it is a fully public site in future. This will be very energy intensive (and subjective as to my mood on each occasion) procedure.

Finally, either remove or deactivate my account, thus removing all security and privacy issues, though at the cost of the functionality.

I haven’t been posting content on Facebook since the beginning of May, although I have accepted around 5 friend requests because I was stood next to the people as they added me on their mobiles, so it would have seemed rude not to. I’m currently in what I would term an ‘unhappy medium’ – I bear all of the risks of the privacy settings with none of the functionality. I need to make a decision on where I am comfortable. Unfortunately I fear it may be the second, most time-consuming option of stripping back to basics, with minimal interaction save as is necessary. In light of my various other concerns, perhaps it is time to search out that alternative. Afterall, when one of the most recent Facebook conferences occurred, there were a lot of people asking Who uses Facebook these days anyways?