An Eye on Diaspora

It's impossible to avoid any conversations about Facebook and the politics of privacy. Facebook is part of our current society—not only in the concept of social sharing and communication but in implementation through the ubiquitous Facebook service. Facebook users have spent years posting content, creating relationships, updating their status and, of course, obsessively managing their virtual farms.

It's impossible to avoid any conversations about Facebook and the politics of privacy. Facebook is part of our current society—not only in the concept of social sharing and communication but in implementation through the ubiquitous Facebook service. Facebook users have spent years posting content, creating relationships, updating their status and, of course, obsessively managing their virtual farms. Consider these numbers:

• There are more than 400 million active Facebook users.
• 50% of active users log on to Facebook in any given day.
• The average user has 130 friends.
• People spend more than 500 billion minutes per month on Facebook.
• More than 25 billion pieces of content (web links, news stories, blog posts, notes, photo albums, etc.) are shared each month.

Quite simply, Facebook makes social networking easy. Log in, and you are presented with a set of tools to manage all of your content and relationships. Facebook even makes suggestions that are surprisingly accurate the more you use its software. The more connections I make and the more groups I join, the easier it is for Facebook to suggest that I become friends with Jurgen, the German exchange student who went to my high school for one year back in 1990. The Facebook equation boils down to this: the more you use it, the more useful it becomes. On the surface, this is an ideal quality of social networking software. However, because of the centralized Facebook infrastructure, the more you use it, the more you are also trapped by it.

Let's imagine a worst-case scenario concerning your posted content: what if you woke up today and Facebook was gone? Where are all of your photos, wall-to-walls, relationships, messages, moods, and worst of all: what is happening to your virtual farm? Hint: it's not gonna plow itself. As much as you might not want to admit it, it's all gone. Sure, you may have copies of your photos on your computer, but what about all of the time you spent maintaining your content and connections? In essence, in order to use the service, you handed over all of your content to Facebook.

That's a consequence of sending your content to Facebook, but what about privacy concerns? The peril lies in the fact that users must dump all the information they share onto the Facebook network. At that point, it is literally out of your hands. Changes in policy over how your content is used and managed are completely up to Facebook. Facebook may decide to share your info with companies that directly purchase user data or advertisers that target you by your online behavior. Recently, Facebook has been trying to do damage control over its "instant personalization" program in which it shared users' profile information with partner companies such as Yelp, Pandora, and Microsoft. Facebook's decision: all users were opted into the program by default.

While Facebook does provide ways to control your privacy settings, for many users it is a confusing jumble of checkboxes and radio buttons. Every content type, application, tool, and service has its own privacy settings, and it isn't very clear about what the settings are actually doing and if some settings are inheriting or overriding other settings. Many users just close their eyes, white-knuckle their mouse, and hope that Facebook is doing what's in its users' best interest. Others find that they must keep checking their account's privacy settings in order to plug holes that keep appearing when Facebook makes changes to its privacy policy. Facebook makes it very simple to just log in and start posting, without ever having to view your own privacy settings. This ease of use, however, has a cost: most features in your account are public by default.

On May 26, Facebook's CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, announced changes in Facebook's privacy controls. Admitting that the biggest complaint from users is that the privacy controls are "complex and they are hard to use," he went on to reveal a simplified privacy settings area. This change addresses some concerns about making it easier to manage the privacy of users' content, but does not deal with Facebook's ability to automatically opt its users into sharing data with other companies.

One reaction to Facebook's way of doing business is the open source Diaspora project. Diaspora wants to take the great aspects of social networking and give content ownership and control back to the user. Boiled down, Diaspora wants to create a single, separate node ("seed") for every user, and then network those nodes together. Each Diaspora seed will be a separate installation of the software, creating a decentralized network. Each user will have complete control over their Diaspora seed: posting content, creating privacy profiles, managing relationships—all over a secure connection. You are posting your own content to your own node.

Diaspora also aims to make your data work in both directions. Not only should you be able to easily post your data, but you should be able to retrieve it as well. This is at the core of Diaspora's philosophy, which is that you are the owner of your own data and you should be able to do what you want with it: post it, make it private, open it to the public, transfer it, delete it. In this scenario, you are in complete control of your data—nothing can be done to it without your permission.

Conceptually, these are all great ideas, but there are a lot of questions about implementation. One great aspect of Facebook is that all you have to do is create an account, log in, and start using the tools. No one can argue that Facebook doesn't make it easy to post information. With Diaspora, you will also have to manage your node, which could include installation, setup, and hosting. My guess is that when the software is released, it will take on a similar life as WordPress. Depending on your level of technical prowess, you can download, install, and manage the software yourself, or companies will pop up that will manage your install for you so that you can concentrate on the content and they can concentrate on the updates and server management. Don't worry, even in the latter instance, you'll still have control over your content; you may just be paying someone a few bucks a month to host it.

It's impossible to predict how this will all play out, but it is clear that people are looking for, and expecting, other options to services like Facebook. An option where you can control your own data is imperative to the longevity of that data as well as to maintaining your online connections. In the end, no matter what social networking platforms arise, users need to play an active role in the administration of their data. Today more than ever, user data is a commodity often sold to the highest bidder. Unfortunately, no one will protect you if you're not protecting yourself.