My boss has written a blog post that tries to bring together some recent data points from across the privacy spectrum; it is worth a read. I’ve been noting a few (much smaller, more trivial) things myself over the past few days that suggest to me that privacy concerns in general, but facebook-related privacy concerns in particular, may be reaching a bit of a critical mass.
No Facebook by avlxyz used under CC-BY-SA.
Some anecdata:
- A graphical interpretation of Facebook’s default privacy settings. Putting aside the content and cool presentation, I’ve been seeing this all over the place the past week- it seems to be resonating with a surprising (to me) number of people.
- Danny Sullivan notices that searching ‘how do I’ on Google… automatically suggests ‘delete my facebook account.’ Again, not hard proof of anything, but suggestive that this is of trending interest. (Note that the trend is particularly trendy in… NYC and LA?)
- I would have expected that Diaspora would have a hard time getting to their $10K goal; instead they’ve raised $136K (and >$27K of it from donations >$350.) I raise this not to say that they will succeed, but to point out that their fundraising totals suggest that there is a pent-up interest in this area.
- James Kwak, a finance blogger (albeit an ex-technologist) blogging about deleting his facebook account. I’ve seen plenty of technologists of various stripes talking about deleting facebook accounts for a while now, but this is the first time I’ve seen someone talking about it in a vaguely more mainstream setting. It is hitting the mainstream media too.
These are just anecdotes, and not real data, but to me this feels vaguely different from the ‘rebellion’ in 2006. At that time I said ‘people adjust and things blow over sometimes.‘ This one feels different to me, but that is just a vague feeling; it may stem as much from my own facebook fatigue as from any concrete reality. It will be interesting to watch, at any rate.
Facebook is indispensible, my lifestyle depends on it for everything from the phone numbers on my Android phone to wedding invitations to finding friend’s houses for events.
But I have a GNewBook account. The only software that can compete with Facebook is Free Software. –and in fact the MySpace Exodus should serve as a huge encouragement to Ubuntu evangelists like myself. If it’s awesome, and it doesn’t cost anything, people will use it.
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Diaspora has been a amazing success (at least the fund raising part). Do you think that Mozilla should support them technically? My guess is that a FOSS social network would be very good for Firefox because its extensions would probably work very well with such a system.
I really hope the Mozilla techies support them with their awesome knowledge about the web.
I can’t really speak for mozilla’s tech, I’m just a lawyer these days ;) But I’ve pointed out some of Mozilla’s relevant techs to the Diaspora guys and hope there can be some meeting of the minds.
Hah, I remember that sign, it was in St Kilda, Melbourne, next to Lentil as Anything.
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I’m suprised by the marketing and fundraising success of Diaspora as well. We have been doing the exact same thing with our open source project Hubbub for months, the same decentralized approach to social networking.
I think I have noticed a similar trend but these things are damn hard to pin point. As an example, the Google Trends data is hardly proof of anything: The search volume index for “delete facebook account” has indeed tripled in 12 months but so has the search volume index for “facebook account”…
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