Beware the Walled Garden
Thursday, April 21st, 2011Yesterday’s ShropCamp event was a great success, attracting a diverse crowd of people wanting to work with Open Data and local government. In particular it brought in a far greater crowd of non-technical people than these events generally attract.
This is good news, of course - but it did mean a lot less awareness of data privacy and, in particular, data ownership.
In the four sessions I attended, participants talked around issues of building Facebook pages, and getting their communities to come there. This brings up one or two issues I promised to address and link to, so here they are:
Going to the places where your community already is, and talking to them there, is a strategic decision, and a correct one. Selecting Facebook, and building your presence there is a tactical decision, and one not to be made without a clear understanding of the downsides.
I’ve covered a lot of this in an article in Linux User last year, introducing open social networks: Social networking: The good, the bad & the ugly. The article was aimed at a technical audience, although the discussion on data privacy and ownership is non-technical. However, to save you wading through it, let’s cover the main points.
Whose data?
1. Facebook is very good at importing data from your other networks, whether tweets or social bookmarks. It’s not so good at passing it back to the outside world. In particular your contacts as a user or your community as a group (those who “like” your page). Should you ever lose your Page, through inadvertently violating the terms of service, what happens to your carefully-nurtured group?
2. There is little privacy on Facebook. Although you can change your settings, few users are even aware of how much about themselves they expose to advertisers and others. If you are building a group of vulnerable users, it may be better to hold most of your discussions with them somewhere you can control the safety of the environment
But our users are on Facebook
There’s no easy answer - you must go where your community is. But go in with your eyes open.
Try and collect name / e-mail at least by persuading people to sign up for a minimal set of announcements (e.g. once a month), which should get the majority of your community to click through and register. That way, were you to ever lose your FB page, you have not lost touch with everyone.
Investigate federated & open social networks. GNU Social and Diaspora are not ready for mainstream use yet, but consider trying Status.Net a sort of federated Twitter, which will make the foundation of GNU Social) internally with staff and volunteers. You can set it to forward all posts to Twitter - and thence on to FB, your blog, and elsewhere - yet remain in full control of your data, and your privacy settings.
Postscript
You can read a little more at:
The Interview with Status.net’s Evan Prodromou.
See links relating to this & ScraperWiki which I mentioned at #Shropcamp
and for those who asked me for more about what I do: try this: -)
& the Complementary Currency Unconference.
Postscript:Political Facebook Groups Deleted On Royal Wedding Day
[added 30/04/2011]
“The Anti-Cuts Space London facebook group has been taken down without warning or permission. In the last 12 hours, facebook has deleted around 50 sites…” Read more here. Interesting comments, including additional groups deleted in the original article. Further coverage in The Guardian.
See also: http://www.openrightsgroup.org/blog/2011/facebook-takedowns:-burying-bad-news
& http://wiki.openrightsgroup.org/wiki/FB_takedowns
And compare with FB’s tardiness in responding over many of the hate groups with pages on Facebook.
To re-iterate: play in somebody else’s walled garden and you play by their rules. If you want freedom of expression, and control of your environment, then you have to make your own. Listen to this:
