My Thoughts & Hopes as a Futurist & Technologist

Hi Facebook, you’ve seen more than imagined unhelpful emotion from your users lately.   It’s very easy to get wrapped up in the emotion but you must remember who helps make you, a group of passionate & intelligent users with tangible insight into what tomorrow may head. And what you’ve excelled at all these years is filling the void of what we all imagined and much of what we’ve feared.

You’ve managed to make a multi-billion dollar power play on advertising. You’ve started realizing the capability of modern innovative communication systems to categorize, stereotype, extract business intelligence & paint a picture of each and every interest we have through years of collection of data in what we thought would be a closed system.

Besides changes in privacy direction, and a what seems to be a company that cares so little about what users want they change it for them without even serving a ballot to let user’s opt one way or another and then claiming that by allowing Facebook to augument our real life connections and interests we are constantly opting in. You let a lawyer tell you what is okay to do to users it seems.

It’s really a lot of imagination which creates much of the concern, mostly because we don’t know who uses what information from us, and for what purpose they are using it now and in the future. There seems to be an intentional lack of information in the communication from Facebook and third party sites concerning what lines you have drawn in the sand, and at what cost those lines will remain unchanged.

At the heart of the angst is the idea that the worst case scenarios are already in the planning states. By your own CEO’s words your not interested in talking about things when these actions are not completed.

What if? What if Facebook used it’s so many users and so many talented engineers and unmatched innovative wit for the good of its user base. Profit is a powerful motive but what if you actually walked the less travelled route of putting profit behind the needs and interests of those who each morning, each afternoon, each evening make your great communication system possible. If you were not so important, we simply wouldn’t care.

I swear to you: If you let users own their data under a similar following term sheet, I know by fact of my experience and thought you will be able to do so much more while keeping users comfortable. What if you kept that stellar innovation on track while just putting yourself in the shoes of our children. What if you led the way not only via powerful, cut throat innovation which has been second nature to you but you did it while holding the hand of the people who love what you can do but not everything that can be done. What if you in all your might and glory held ongoing, vast, organized communication streams with the .01 percent of your users who not only scream at you but also have given you so many ideas on how to improve your communication system. Communication is at the center of what makes your systems so fantastic, not just the semantic customization, but the order of magnitude you’ve combined real life with virtual life. We are naked & in bed with you, please stop doing what you must do to keep us happy but everything you’ve ever imagined is possible to make us happy thoughtful, social beings we are all trying to be. Your power has made you grow out of reach of ordinary citizens. I invite you to communicate with me. I will (many others would too) give you my word that with hand in hand we can further explore what’s possible in an age where communication systems are so fantastic and scary. We must do it together.

My wisdom and technical wit (I swear I have no conflicts of interest, and genuinely have been brooding for a way forward that’s healthy for the world considering many of you in power will not always be around. Facebook, I’m asking you from the bottom of my heart to do for communication what Google did for information. You are well on your way but you’ve not put your users first every day of your life. Forget about your IPO. It’s really plain and simple what needs done moving forward.
Users need the ability to own their own data & metadata.
Users need access to their own data & metadata in a highly Facebook influenced W3C style standard. Please do this before it’s done for you knowing AOL’s mission is the same as yours except they tried to capture information in their garden as you try to merge human data with you very advanced communication systems.
3. Users need to know what data is collected about them in a way that makes the user comfortable as well and protects trade secrets & protects the company’s interest that serves the user.
4. Users need a comprehensive list of companies which data is or might be shared with.
5. Users need to understand who, how and why their data is being re-purposed.
6. The only way to keep companies honest is having users granted the capability to revoke usage rights retroactively.
100 percent non negotiable understanding of ANY intent ANY company holding user data has that MIGHT have the capability comprise their privacy now, in the future or in the past.

Take a walk with us Facebook, one that shows you care about what your users care about or will soon care about. Take a walk with us Facebook, investors, engineers, designers holding the hands of the users who are now looking at you to take the dumb out of dumb pipe and we will gratefully reward all of your innovations and considerations. We will become and remain fans once we know–undoubtably–that doing the right thing is the most important goal–not obstacle–to you. We all make mistakes but we need to know things you’ve done are mistakes and mistakes from which we will grow and we will learn. I am very open to suggestions and argument on any posted items. The privacy obscurantism must not continue.

There is a huge marketing race to kill anonymity on the internet which is being pushed very hard with a lot of money. Companies loose a substantial competitive edge in most markets by knowing exactly who you are, what you do, what you buy, and according to statistics what this will mean you will probably buy soon. Capitalism is the best, and the most creative and the most powerful force on eath. (Gravity is pretty weak actually) Unfortunately capitalism does so much good that we must constantly stand up against what it does wrong. These are natural techno-economical forces at work. I’m very happy we have the Electronic Frontier Foundation. They have some of the most brilliant minds working on exposing some of the problems we face as we move the world forward in the hopefully right direction. They stand up for those who can’t stand up for themselves.

From their article: “Browser fingerprinting is a powerful technique, and fingerprints must be considered alongside cookies and IP addresses when we discuss web privacy and user trackability,” said Eckersley.

This is very true. The “Fingerprint” also known as a cookie, or tracking cookie has been one of the top concerns of privacy advocates for over a decade.  With HTML 5 location info we are walking into the unknown. None of these issues need to be so, we should push back especially because these problems are relatively easy to solve. I believe this is yet another reason why we must push as hard as possible to own all our data. We should choose the sites which are allowed to do what we feel is responsible with our data and retain the power to truncate ourselves intelligently when we feel a site has crossed our line. Advertising targeted between our eyes is getting smarter. Now they can and do “joins” (a database operation which intelligently selects attributes from one data source with another usually yielding more useful data.) with cookie data they’ve amassed for decades where allowed by law with new emerging data sets which leave very little to the advertiser or data miners imagination or margin of error.  When Google was facing a hell storm for privacy many years ago I was asking why no one cared what Facebook had been collecting. I’m pretty sure that even though search engines must delete data about you after a retention period social networks including Facebook get to keep it forever.

If I can understand what data who has of mine and how it’s used, then it’s possible to have a win-win situation. We need an open-standards compliant format which houses, exposes, rates, grants, revokes, & tags all of our data and the types of companies who have a license to it. We simply must own our data moving forward from this day on (and retroactively) because if evil mart knows everything about you, there is not a procecutor who even needs to get a warrant, how long until wholesale data warehouses are available to anyone with a dime and a bad idea? If we own our digital selves, the protections our forefathers put in place would help to keep this country and others the right side up as far as freedom and the people who died for are concerned.