Fun with Facebook and Privacy game theory

News today that Facebook has owned up to mistakes and will shortly announce steps to put it right- Mashable:

Hey,

We’ve been listening to all the feedback and have been trying to distill it down to the key things we need to improve. I’d like to show an improved product rather than just talk about things we might do.

We’re going to be ready to start talking about some of the new things we’ve built this week. I want to make sure we get this stuff right this time.

I know we’ve made a bunch of mistakes, but my hope at the end of this is that the service ends up in a better place and that people understand that our intentions are in the right place and we respond to the feedback from the people we serve.

I hope we’ll get a chance to catch up in person sometime this week. Let me know if you have any thoughts for me before then.

Mark

Apparently this was an email sent to Robert Scoble. Now Mashable, despite being very respectful of Facebook and doing the obligatory A List shtick of opining that "the privacy dustup will eventually blow over and Facebook will continue its relentless march to win the web" did make the point that:

To Facebook’s audience, it has seemed that Facebook either doesn’t know or doesn’t care about user concerns around privacy. If Facebook does indeed share user concerns and will soon make changes (as Mark explains), a very early mea culpa and increased communication with the press may have saved Facebook from a great deal of criticism.

In short: It’s great that Facebook is looking to improve its privacy settings, but explaining these moves earlier and more publicly may have been preferable.

It's not exactly surprising though - Facebook's standard modus operandi is arguably to push the boundary, see if there is any resistance, if there is they initially try and tough it out, then try and persuade the market that they are right and the users are wrong (initially by itself and then via proxies), and finally take a step back if there is still resistance (usually to come back at it a while later). We are about to enter the "one step back" piece of this cycle. This led me to write the tongue in cheek Facebook Privacy Reduction Decision Tree (in the style of Roger Mellie*) above.

It will be interesting to see if the proposed modifications don't help

As one of the Mashable comments puts it:

This isn't rocket science. Respect your customers. Don't spring stuff on them. Do not make "sharing" the default. Give people total control over their information and protect their privacy. Don't tell them what they want in terms of privacy and sharing, which is rude, patronizing and insulting. Especially aimed at someone who is old enough to be your mother.

The harder you have squeezed me to share, the more content I have removed from my profile, which now is almost everything possible. At this point, I will use no commercial apps, click on no ads, "like" no businesses of any kind. I do not appreciate nor will I participate in any FB presence which has been added with out my permission to sites like CNN. And this will continue to be MY policy until you prove you can be trusted.

Now, to return to the Mashable (et al) point that this will all blow over, I think the comment above implies that there is another game that may emerge here which I have captured in the system dynamic diagram below.



In short, Facebook is not the only actor in this game - the more privacy it erodes, the less people will put on it, so the less valuable their data is, so the more they have to erode privacy....you get the picture.

How likely is this scenario? At the moment the resistance to Facebook is mainly in Geekville and starting to permeate the more intelligent mainstream media like the NY TImes, Economist etc, but it is also starting to hit various regulatory bodies and if it gets on to the mass media, thats a real tipping point.

I'd predict ( along with Mashable, SAI, GigaOm and all the other A List Apologists), that this is not the brouhaha that will trigger the tipping point. But I don't think Facebooks ever upward march is assured. I think it will be the next one that hits the mainstream worry - and there will be a next one, its in the DNA (and probably the business plan too - that IPO and the need to declare numbers must be focussing minds somewhat).