The Facebook Debacle Proves We Still Suck At Explaining Tech
And by we I mean us techies, geeks, and social media experts
There have been a lot of great posts on Facebook’s privacy debacle. And if you’re looking for a common thread in all of them is that those of us in the industry weren’t surprised in the least. We knew Facebook’s data privacy controls were leaky as hell. We shrugged because we (collectively) figured we could take measures to protect ourselves in a variety ways.
Oh how naive we were.
Not that we couldn’t take measures to protect ourselves, but that the rest of the social media using population would too. I remember lots of posts over the past 10 years on how to tune your Facebook privacy settings, how to keep tabs on Facebook’s changes, and all the sketchy things we uncovered.
We truly didn’t get it. The people who needed the information didn’t see it, didn’t understand it, or didn’t realize how important it was.
And that’s our fault.
I’m not alone in this assessment
My friend Alexandra Samuel wrote great pieces of JSTOR?—?What Congress Should Know About the Internet | JSTOR Daily?—?and here on Medium
https://medium.com/@awsamuel/hate-facebook-maybe-its-you-b710a3816dc6
On different aspects of this topic. I didn’t watch Zuckerberg’s full testimony before Congress?—?I really have better things to do with my time?—?but I read the analysis and what it shows from the question about how Facebook makes money (ads) to if Facebook can read WhatsApp messages (it can’t), is that we blew it. Royally blew it.
We didn’t find the ways or the terms or whatever to explain how the modern Internet (the first DotCom boom to the present) works.
If the service or app is free, you’re the product being sold
We hear that adage over and over again. We share it with friends wondering why a search for cast iron cookware recipes triggers cookware ads all over Facebook and all the other websites you visit. And yet…
My in-laws use Facebook to keep up with friends spread out over Western Canada, their kids (my wife and sibling-in-laws), and granddaughter (my youngest). They like, comment, and share like most baby boomers you come across. They are proficient enough to use the app on their devices and communicate. All good. Then one day my wife was talking with her mom about Facebook and it hit us that my mother-in-law (like many people) had no idea that Facebook made money from ads. And that the ads you see were triggered by all the things you do on Facebook (and beyond).
“How do you think Facebook makes money? They are still a business. They have to pay people all the other business things.” “I thought they just sold their stock for that.”
And that conversation is an indictment of me as much as anything. How did I miss and not explain how things work? A person who is skittish about shopping online for privacy and security reasons (unfounded) didn’t know about the most fundamental part of how Facebook and similar sites work.
And I’m not alone in this indictment. If techies were the mafia we could all be charged under RICO laws for conspiracy to keep the world ignorant. We’d counter we wrote posts about it. We offered webinars. We wrote books.
Not freakin’ enough. Not by a long shot.
What now?
The cat’s out of the bag, horses out of the barn, and the milk is spilled. We can’t fix the stupid things Facebook did (and they were stupid). We can’t untake quizzes (if you’re taking them, you really need to think about stopping. Matching which Harry Potter character you should marry might not be worth the data gleaned from your answers). All we can do now is double down on telling it like it is.
Here’s the deal…
- If you give a company your email address, chances are they will email you later about something. Usually that’s something they are selling.
- Unless you block all ads while you surf (which I’ve tried and often doesn’t work too well), what you search for, click on, and browse will build an online profile about you that advertisers will use.
- Any site, app, or service that you use and get some value from (Facebook, LinkedIn, Spotify, Gmail, Google…) that you don’t pay for (like Spotify Premium) makes money buy offering you up like the fatted calf to advertisers. I’ve bought those ads and the ability to target people from 18–45 interested in comic books, superhero movies, cosplay, and role playing games is great when your client wants to sell something to that group.
- Anything and everything you upload online is there forever. Period. There are no take backs. No whoopsies. No mulligans. Don’t believe me? Here are links to some of the first sites I built. Some of these are over 20 years old. I’ve found posts from old science forums I was a part of and ancient blog posts from sites long gone:
- Glaxo Wellcome from March 1997 (yeah I made that, including all the graphics) https://web.archive.org/web/19970327062817/http://www.glaxowellcome.com:80/
- HerpesHelp.com from 1998 (dig those graphics) https://web.archive.org/web/19980204045709/http://www.herpeshelp.com:80/
- Glaxo Wellcome Canada from 1999 (the last site I built in the DotCom era) https://web.archive.org/web/19990125095625/http://www.glaxowellcome.ca:80/
- My first consulting site from 2003 https://web.archive.org/web/20030720200401/http://www.larixconsulting.com:80/
Now do you believe me?
Over to you
I think those cover the basics. Oh I don’t expect these will surprise any of you reading this. That is the problem. What we need to do is to tell everyone else these points.
We helped build this. We helped create the problem. Now we have to fix it.
This article from Convince and Convert is great, for marketers, but only serves to reinforce my point above. We aren’t helping make things better for everyone else.
https://medium.com/@awsamuel/hate-facebook-maybe-its-you-b710a3816dc6
More on this and the premise that we are the product.
https://medium.com/@awsamuel/hate-facebook-maybe-its-you-b710a3816dc6