Summary: This post is a continuation of yesterday’s discussion. My personal opinion about Facebook Beacon is that they got it wrong, principally because it violates two of the cardinal rules of privacy: relationship and control.

Yesterday, I covered some of the negative reactions Facebook got to the launch of its Beacon ad platform. Today I’ll give you my take on the matter, but first an update on the worsening backlash to FB’s perceived privacy invasion.

Yesterday, MoveOn condemned Beacon and launched, in a stunning twist of irony, a Facebook group to protest it. At of 7AM PST, the group had 2,000 members. Right now it’s 8:00PM in Cali, and the group has swelled to 8,787 members. Their movement is being covered by the New York Times, the LA Times, and CNN, among many others.

A rival group has sprung up to complain about the complainers. As of this writing, MoveOn.org and their Facebook group against Beacon need to leave Facebook has eight members. Eight.

The original protest group has a couple of dissenters as well, including a discussion board titled, ‘MoveOn is distorting the issue.’ Most of the comment thread, though, comes from people clarifying the privacy problem rather than fighting to save Facebook’s reputation. This excerpt, posted by one Simon C (and reproduced here with his permission), comes to the crux of the matter:

People share a positively astounding amount of data on Facebook, stuff I cringe to see: real names, relationships, email addresses; even postal addresses and phone numbers, for fuck’s sake. And in initiating a wide-ranging tracking program, silently and non-optionally, Facebook has taken a huge step towards building a (to me) far more comprehensive log of my personal activity than I deem acceptable, and one which is strongly linked to a lot of real-life data. Moreover, it has done so without offering me any new functionality that I value.

In creating a Facebook profile, I enter a certain amount of data on the understanding that it will be used by Facebook to target me with advertising. In exchange, I get a pretty clean, functional site that allows me to connect with old friends, and share photographs swiftly (the zombie/pirate shit can fuck right off). Beacon offers no such quid pro quo. Facebook have unilaterally decided to take ownership of my web activity, *without telling me*, and in exchange have offered me the distinctly dubious privilege of sharing my shopping habits with my “friends”. I fail to see the benefit to me here, and I strongly resent the presumption that my internet activity is free to be monitored without my consent.

Now here’s my opinion (I know you’ve been hanging out for it, and I certainly don’t want to disappoint):

Facebook’s Beacon violates two of the cardinal rules of privacy: relationship and control.

One of those rules is that privacy is a relationship. It is the relationship that governs what happens after we share any information of any kind with anyone, anywhere.

The privacy relationship is what prevents my doctor from telling you what drugs I may or may not be on.

The privacy relationship is why my lawyer won’t tell you what we discuss in the confines of his office.

The privacy relationship is why my friends won’t tell strangers my deepest darkest secrets.

The privacy relationship is why I don’t mind it when companies that receive my information use it to market back to me. This is a two-way privacy street. They’re not telling me anything I didn’t already know. If I search for ‘new cars’, and Google shows me ads of new cars, that makes sense. I shared my private info with them, they use it to enhance our interaction. This is the same thing my doctor does and the same thing my lawyer does. I share my information with them on the understanding they will use it only to benefit me.

This relationship is also why most people don’t get worked up about behavioral targeting: see David Berkowitz’ excellent piece 1984 Fan, Do You Find Facebook’s Ad Targeting Creepy? He took out an ad targeting Facebook users that had self-identified as fans of George Orwell’s book 1984 and asked them, in the ad, what they thought about being targeted by the ad. The responses are telling: most people had no objection whatsoever.

The problem with Beacon, though, is that it violates that relationship by sharing your information with other people, people you may or may not want your information shared with, in a way that doesn’t necessarily benefit you.

I share with Google: I get free search and relevant results. Facebook shares with my friends: I get questions I don’t want and a boyfriend who knows what he’s getting for Hanukkah.

The second cardinal rule that Beacon violates is control. When I share information with my doctor, I have to sign a waiver before she’s allowed to share it with anyone else. With Beacon, I have to find every person my doctor might consider sharing my info with, and tell them that I don’t want them to have it. It’s an undue burden, and it takes the data from the dominion of the users and puts it in control of organizations who don’t respect the privacy relationship (see Cardinal Rule 1).

So, yeah, I think Facebook got it wrong on this one. They can and should recover, and I hope they do, but I also hope the lessons permeate. We as users—myself included—have been inordinately permissive with the way our data gets bandied about, but we’re making it clear that some boundaries shouldn’t be crossed.

As always, I’d love to know your response, whether or not you agree with me. Privacy is about all of us, and the collective decides the norm.

Summary: Facebook’s Beacon program, which announces your purchases on your FB profile feed, has generated some vociferous responses from privacy advocates. There are some profound issues here that I’d like to explore in more depth. This post covers responses to the program so far, starting with Om Malik and running the gamut from Search Insider to the Wall Street Journal. Tomorrow, I’ll provide my thoughts on the matter.

I was all ready to leave this topic alone, really! But the issues that have been raised since the launch of Facebook’s Beacon advertising platform have become too central to the topic of privacy for me to ignore.

The social-graph-leveraging ad service was pegged as a potential privacy nightmare the day it was launched (November 6) by Om Malik, who raised some pointed questions to the good folks at FB and received responses that were vague at best, leaving him to conclude:

…in reality, this is a privacy disaster waiting to happen. The javascript on the Fandango site pops up a little screen which asks if you want to publish the information on Facebook. If you say no, your friends won’t see the information, but apparently Facebook still receives it. This means that if you are a Facebook member, Facebook will know what you are doing on each of their partner sites. And there is no way for you to opt out of that. Or is there? I asked Facebook to clarify and I am still waiting for them to write back.

We could say that this is a knee-jerk reaction—after all, it came out the very day the program launched—so it’s worth checking into subsequent opinions and experiences from the past two weeks. (Yes, yes, I know that it’s only been two weeks and we’re still dealing with knee-jerk reactions. I’m just summing up the situation to date.)

The day after the GigaOm stake-in-the-ground, MediaPost’s Just An Online Minute backed him up:

Another part of Faceboook’s plan, the Beacon program, is far more troubling from a privacy point of view. That initiative involves informing people’s friends of purchases they’ve made online. In other words, if one Facebook member buys a DVD of, say, season two of “The Office,” and allows that information to be shared with others, the member’s Facebook friends will be notified that one of their contacts has purchased that DVD.

Users will be able to opt out of the service, but privacy concerns remain. Simply explaining this type of offering to people who aren’t familiar with Web advertising might prove difficult, let alone explaining the opt-out procedure. What’s more, even tech-savvy users mistakenly check the wrong boxes online, inadvertently opting in instead of out and vice versa.

Headlines of stories about Beacon continued to touch on the potential negatives; a piece from my university paper, the Cornell Daily Sun, came out with The Last Straw for Facebook?, while Mark Simon’s Search Insider column the following Monday was titled Social Ads or Social Networking Nightmare?

Privacy advocates and legal eagles picked up the thread, with the Wall Street Journal last Friday reporting on the real-world implementation of the program (thanks to PogoWasRight for the tip):

…Last Sunday the Law Blog purchased three tickets to “Bee Movie” on Fandango, the movie site. After we did this, Facebook automatically updated our profile to say, “Peter bought ‘Bee Movie’ on Fandango.”

Huh? Did we want everyone on Facebook to know our movie-buying habits? Not really. But it seems we agreed to this. According to Fandango’s privacy policy, which we agreed to by using the site, “If you are a member of a social network service (such as Facebook, MySpace, etc.) or you use other Internet sites where you have authorized them to gather information about your online behavior on Fandango . . . Fandango may share information regarding your activities . . . with those third parties pursuant to your authorization.”

Then we checked out our privacy settings on Facebook. Under “Privacy Settings for External Websites,” there’s a Fandango icon, indicating that we’ve agreed to have our actions on Fandango sent to our Facebook profile. We changed our profile, mandating that they never — never! — do this again.

And now today. CNet’s Caroline McCarthy reported that MoveOn, which historically has focused its energy on domestic regime change, has decided that Facebook Beacon poses a significant privacy problem, one that has to be stopped:

Online activist group MoveOn.org is poised to announce a campaign targeting Facebook’s “Beacon” advertisements, which post information about users’ activity on partner sites (movie rentals, purchases from online retailers) onto their friends’ News Feeds. According to MoveOn representatives, the organization considers this to be a “glaring violation of (Facebook’s) users’ privacy,” and has launched a paid ad campaign on Facebook, a “protest group” on the social-networking site, and an online petition to encourage the company to allow users to opt into the program at their own volition.

“The bottom line,” MoveOn spokesman Adam Green said in an interview with CNET News.com, “is that no Facebook user should have their private purchases online posted for the entire world to see without their explicit opted-in permission.”

It’s true that Beacon advertisements are limited to the news feeds of the people on a user’s friends list, but Green said that doesn’t make a difference. He cited Facebook user testimonials that ranged from members who said their entire Christmas lists had been published on their News Feeds (spoiling many a surprise in the process) to student activists who were concerned that sensitive purchases might show up and result in serious consequences–”If a college kid rents Brokeback Mountain and some homophobic person on his campus sees that, that could be a real problem,” he explained.

This was too much heat for Facebook to ignore, so, a couple of hours after the MoveOn announcement, they responded with one of their own:

“We encourage feedback from our users on new products,” the Facebook statement read, “but in this case, the MoveOn.org-led group misrepresents how Facebook Beacon works. Beacon gives users an easy way to share relevant information from other sites with their friends on Facebook.”

…Facebook’s statement stressed that because this information is not public, it isn’t an invasion of privacy. “Information is shared with a small selection of a user’s trusted network of friends, not publicly on the Web or with all Facebook users,” the statement explained. “Users also are given multiple ways to choose not to share information from a participating site, both on that site and on Facebook.”

MoveOn.org spokesman Adam Green was quick to provide an additional response. “If Facebook’s argument is that sharing private information with hundreds or thousands of someone’s closest ‘friends’ is not the same as making that information ‘public,’ that shows how weak Facebook’s argument is,” Green said in an e-mail. “Facebook users across the nation are outraged that the books, movies, and gifts they buy privately on other sites are being displayed publicly without permission–and it’s time for Facebook to reverse this massive privacy breach.”

I’ll pick this story up tomorrow and give you my view on the implications and issues, but I’d also really like to hear your reactions, both to this post and to the Facebook Beacon program as a whole. What do you think of it? Have you seen it in action?

A lot of people think famous people don’t have a right to privacy. I disagree. So does Jamie Oliver, if this video is anything to go by.

Caution: This video contains the ‘f’ word.

Double caution: In honor of Jimmy, this video contains Ewan McGregor talking about Trainspotting.

Just because someone chooses to entertain us, to share their passion with us, to enrich and enliven our existences with music, movies, food, or words, doesn’t mean we’re granted or entitled to an all-access pass to the backstage of their lives. We are all human beings; even the most extroverted among us have moments we prefer to keep intimate.

In addition, as Jamie and Ewan point out, their children didn’t choose to display themselves to the public, and kids have the right to decide for themselves if they want to jump into the spotlight along with Mom or Dad.

You might disagree—or even call me a hypocrite, after all, I confess to an utterly guilty fascination with Britney and her exploits. Perhaps if people like me didn’t feed the gaping maw of the media monster, it wouldn’t be such an issue. Or perhaps your heart goes out to Jamie and his family. Either way, I’d love to hear your thoughts on the matter.

eSnips is mapping social genes while 23andMe gives you access to the biological kind. VortexDNA, on the other hand, focuses on purpose, values and belief systems in creating our seven-digit genome. We’re all on the same page here. This post explores the different approaches our companies are taking.

Renee Blodgett from the Down the Avenue blog has a post describing eSnips and their Social DNA tool. Social DNA connects like-minded people by matching their ‘digital genes,’ a term eSnips is using to measure people’s propensity for particular lifestyles, movies, music, etc. In her post, Renee uses a party metaphor to explain why such a tool might be useful:

Imagine walking into a cocktail party, full of strangers. Instead of feeling overwhelmed, each person is wearing a name tag that tells you where and how you connect in different areas of your life, i.e., 67% alike on politics, 74% alike on eating habits, 4% on workout habits and so on. Enter the world of Social DNA.

A key premise of Web 2.0 services is the ability to discover like-minded people through common friends or tags. eSnips Social DNA takes this ability to the next level by matching people with others who resemble them most based on thousands of defined aspects of their lives.

Well, obviously I have to comment on that! First of all, I think it’s wonderful that they’re exploring ways of finding out how much in alignment people are, and I’d love to speak with Renee or anyone from eSnips about the parallels in our approaches (if any of you are reading this, send me an email! kaila @ vortexdna . com).

Like eSnips, VortexDNA is also seeking to facilitate people’s alignment with the world around them and remove friction. While eSnips focuses on external interests (political views, sports, etc.), VortexDNA is focused on core purpose and values. Our (research-backed) belief is that purpose and values have predictive characteristics that can generate a much deeper understanding of people’s outward behavior.

VortexDNA and eSnips aren’t the only two entities bringing the subject of DNA to the table. Yesterday, the New York Times published a piece by Amy Harmon called My Genome, MySelf: Seeking Clues in DNA. Amy explores the new frontier of personalized DNA-mapping (the ‘deoxyribonucleic acid’ kind, not the ‘VortexDNA purpose and values’ kind). She went to Google investee 23andMe and spit in a cup for the opportunity to explore her biological code, checking for her likelihood to contract cancer, develop Type II diabetes, or taste the bitterness in brussels sprouts.

Amy’s adventures are intriguing, and I can see the attraction of whiling away an afternoon browsing my single nucleotide polymorphisms (aka SNPs or ’snips’—and possibly the source of eSnips’ name?). I’d also love to speak with anyone from your organization! What resonated most for me, though, was this comment:

…I had decided not to submit my daughter’s DNA for testing — at least not yet — because I didn’t want to regard anything about her as predestined. If she wants to play the piano, who cares if she lacks perfect pitch? If she wants to run the 100-meter dash, who cares if she lacks the sprinting gene? And did I really want to know — did she really want to know someday — what genes she got from which parent and which grandparent?

Bravo, Amy! And I’ll take that sentiment a bit further: current science says that it’s the environment that determines whether certain genes will turn on or off—an environment that includes a person’s purpose and values.

A gene with a predisposition against sprinting doesn’t mean that Amy’s daughter won’t win an Olympic medal, or even that she won’t adore the sport. Just because somebody gives you a stack of wood and some nails, it doesn’t mean you’re going to end up with a house. It’s up to you to decide.

That’s what VortexDNA is about. Helping people see how free we all are to implement our grandest vision for our lives. We’re not limited by the genes on those 23 chromosomes.

We’re only limited by our beliefs.

What do you think about these companies and initiatives, and how would you react to finding out that you lack the piano-playing gene? Would you let it stop you, or would you still aim for Carnegie Hall?

Grrrr… In the past week, I’ve been overwhelmed by spammy trackbacks, poker, roulette, and payday advances mostly. I’m fed up! So I’ve turned trackbacks off.

That being said, if you are legitimately linking to any of my posts, I’d like to make sure you have the acknowledgment you deserve. So you have a couple of options:

1. Leave a comment with a link to your post.
2. Shoot me an email (kaila @ vortexdna . com) and I will link back to your post.

I will not yield… I will not give in… I will stand and fight for my right to provide spam-free, relevant content!

Are you with me?!?

I haven’t finished John Battelle’s The Search yet, but man it’s so good! I suppose I should have expected the cofounding editor of Wired to be a captivating writer, but honestly I didn’t think a story about search engines could be so interesting.

Of course, it doesn’t hurt that a lot of what he says supports the core principles of VortexDNA. The other day, I wrote about his Database of Intentions. Now he’s talking about purpose and values. On page 137, discussing how the famous slogan, “Don’t Be Evil,” came about, he says:

…with all the changes, and all the new people (Google was hiring an average of five new employees a week), how might the company ensure that its original DNA—the founders’ vision, values and principles—remained intact? [emphasis mine]

In that innocuous sentence, John unintentionally sums up succinctly and dramatically the core proposition of VortexDNA:

The DNA formed by vision, values and principles is what influences outcomes, more so than what genes you were born with.

This is true for individuals, companies, communities and societies. We self-organize around our shared identity, and our shared identity is created by our belief systems and our purpose.

This has always been true, but the Internet gives us an unprecedented anthropological opportunity to study the formation and movement of communities. Imagine, for example, a stop-action film depicting the rise and fall of AOL, AltaVista, and Pets.com, or the ebb and flow of membership and participation in MySpace and Facebook.

I visualize it like tides or waves—subject to the mathematics of momentum, the movement of the great ocean, the spinning of the Earth, and the pull of the moon. Fluid dynamics, like this picture from the NASA Langley Research Center:

We are each and every one of us part of the tide, and we now have the chance to begin to understand it.

Has the Internet changed the way you think about society? Has it reduced your boundaries or facilitated community participation? Have you noticed changes in the world around you that you can attribute to the way people are beginning to interact with each other online? I’d love to hear about your observations.