Last weekend I had the privilege of speaking with Rosh Sillars on his podcast New Media Photographer on some of the concerns facing photographers when using facebook in light of their new privacy issues.

I wanted to expand on some of my frustrations with facebook.

Bait and Switch

I remember when I first signed up for facebook.  I used my real name and put tons of private information in all of the fields in hopes that some of my old classmates would be able to find and contact me.  Many of them did.  In fact, I was able to make contact with hundreds of old friends, family, and classmates (from college and high school).  In making these contacts I, like almost everyone else in the world, was under the impression that our information was mostly private in the sandbox that facebook presented to us.

What many people did not realize, and admittedly I didn’t understand until too late, was that in order for facebook to properly monetize their website they would have to open up more and more of their information to advitsers and search engines.  Duh!

This, seemingly, would put facebook in a morally sticky situation.  Leave the website private–just like it was sold to it’s extremely large user base–or open it up to advertisers?

If it’s hard to comprehend exactly how much change has occurred over time at facebook with their privacy policies this visualization should drop your jaw!

Certainly, with all of the bad PR that facebook has received as of late, facebook chose the latter option.  Facebook users vowed to delete their accounts and many digerati led the way in this movement.  Big names like Leo Laporte, Matte Cutts, and Cory Doctorow all deleted their accounts or made them inactive because they believe that their influence, as public figures in the tech industry, encourage people to sign up for facebook and unknowingly share their private information.  It’s really hard for me not to agree.  In fact, at this point, it’s really hard for me not to delete my account.

Who should be concerned?

I suppose that’s the real question here isn’t it?  I mean, many people have obviously said (by NOT deleting their facebook accounts) that they don’t really care about these privacy issues.  Should they care?

Teachers and professors should.  They could lose their jobs by posting things that were once thought to be held private and segregated from students and other faculty.

People who rent may not want to post party pics for fear of getting evicted.

Oh yeah…and anyone bored at work could get fired for saying so.

To be fair many people who have lost their jobs or faced public scrutiny over facebook postings can often times only blame themselves.  They should have had a better understanding of who can and can’t read their facebook profiles.  But when the facebook’s privacy policy is longer than the constitution of the United States perhaps everyone should be concerned!

The real problem?

The problem with quitting facebook is that it’s really useful for keeping up with friends and family and it’s easy to use.  Add the fact that 10s of millions of people sign up for facebook every month and you’ve got quite a dilemma.

I want to see pictures of my sister’s little one.  I like that I can keep in touch with some of my old buddies seamlessly as they post updates about their lives.  I actually care when my buddy who lives in Las Vegas (whom I only get to see about once a year) posts that he’s bummed or excited or whatever.  How about my other lifelong friends that are scattered across Texas and the rest of the United States?  I like to keep up with their lives too.  This, by the way, is coming from that aspect of myself as a digital consumer.   Not the part of me that is a digital content creator.

If you’re a social media persona, of any kind, it’s really hard to leave that many eyeballs on the table.  Sharing your digital content online is easy and it spreads fairly well on facebook if it hits the right audience.  You can manage fan pages and utilize plugins on your websites and blogs to reach millions of users.  You can help control the brand that you’ve built.

You may be wondering if there really is life after facebook after all of that.  That’s a question only you can answer and one that I’m currently pondering.

I think now is the time for a new and open platform to come and dethrone facebook.  I’d love for something like Diaspora or OneSocialWeb to become viable alternatives to facebook.  I think we’ll see many developers and investors tackle this area of potential and someone will climb to the top.

WordPress is one of the leading blogging platforms on the planet because it’s open and customizable.  Why shouldn’t our social networking platforms be as well?

None of this is new BTW!

The writing has been on the wall for quite some time.  Facebook doesn’t care about your privacy.  There have been concerns with facebook’s privacy and policy changes with every “innovation” or “new feature” that they implement.

Here are some examples:

The Next Facebook Privacy Scandal (Jan 2008)

Facebook Privacy Concerns: An Open Letter to Mark Zuckerberg (Jan 2010)

Facebook Platform Privacy (Oct 2007)

Facebook’s New Privacy Changes: The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly (Dec 2009)

Facebook: All Your Stuff is Ours, Even If You Quit (Feb 2009)

There’s a pattern here.  Change policy or settings, upset tons of users, apologize, rinse and repeat.

Even Zuckerberg’s recent op-ed in the Washington post needed revising in order for the truth to come out.

What CAN you do?

I suppose you have 4 options.

1. You can ignore it all and continue to use facebook in the fashion you have grown accustomed to using the service.  Most facebook users will fall into this category out of sheer ignorance.
2. You can make your facebook profile as absolutely private as you can.
3. You can only use facebook with the thinking that it is a public service and that anything can and will be used against you in the court of public scrutiny.
4. You can delete your account.

If you, for whatever reason, decide you’d like to quite facebook you are NOT alone.  May 31 has been deemed Quit Facebook Day and thousands have signed up.

I guess I’m giving myself until that day to decide what I’m going to do with my facebook profile.  I’m already at option 3 but looking closely at option 4.

I don’t think that quitting facebook is the answer for everyone.  Even if I did, it would be delusional to think I could somehow entice 500 million users to do so.  We need alternatives.

Remember when MySpace was huge?

I have a feeling that we’ll be asking that same question in 10 years about facebook.  Could be sooner, I suppose, but I wouldn’t count on it.