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Google, Facebook, Privacy — And You
Posted Jan 28, 2012 by Keith Teare
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Curebit Apologizes for Copying 37Signals: “Stupid, Lazy, and Disrespectful”
[google-privacy-policy.jpg?w=400]
Editor’s note: Guest author Keith Teare is General Partner at his
incubator Archimedes Labs and CEO of newly funded just.me. He was a
co-founder of TechCrunch.
Like millions of other people, I got an email from Google this morning.
It was entitled “Changes to Google Privacy Policy and Terms of
Service”. The first sentence describes the intent of the changes as
shortening 60 policies into one, and improving their readability.
Then there is a longer explanation captured in the graphic above.
The email goes on to assert that Google has not changed its privacy
policy and will not sell our personal information to third parties –
“Our privacy policies remain unchanged”. So what is going on here?
Facebook is the shiny object that Larry is focused on.
This is a week where Sheryl Sandberg – Chief Operating Officer at
Facebook – spoke at Hubert Burda’s DLD conference in Munich and stated
that we were in the middle of 3 trends. First, a trend “from anonymity
to real identity”. Secondly, a trend from “wisdom of crowds to wisdom
of friends” and third, a trend “from being receivers of information to
broadcasters of information”. See the video below for the actual points
she made. It was a thoughtful and at the same time a polemical speech,
a speech with a strong point of view. In thinking about Google’s
privacy policy changes it helps to listen to Sheryl’s remarks and
reflect on the context.
IFRAME:
http://www.youtube.com/embed/hTpBvnzu7eU?version=3&rel=1&fs=1&autohide=
2&showsearch=0&showinfo=1&iv_load_policy=1&wmode=transparent
Facebook is saying that the Internet as a pure information retrieval
mechanism is dead. That the “readwrite” web that began as long ago as
cheap web site hosting in 1998, has entirely replaced the read-only
web. That the identifiable author has replaced the anonymous one. We
are broadcasting and we are identifiable. That reading what friends say
is now dominant in that world. Facebook envisages a future in which we
all broadcast almost everything to almost everybody.
Google’s problem.
In that world, Google’s PageRank algorithm is seriously out of date. It
promotes pages based on the number of links to it. Today, pages are no
longer the unit of publishing. Far smaller items than a page dominate
our senses. And those smaller messages are produced in huge quantity
and in real time. So the signals that make something relevant have now
changed. Facebook (and Twitter) have oodles of such signals. Google,
until recently, had none.
Google’s solution.
The changes in Google’s terms and conditions are primarily focused on
providing the company with an integrated set of data capable of feeding
it signals about what is and is not relevant to each of us as we search
the vast amount of data produced by the second. In that sense it is not
only the right strategic move, it is a question of life and death.
Google is doing a pivot, in order to remain relevant. It’s hard to
disagree that this is necessary. It also seems clear that neither
company is being intentionally “evil”. However, there is a dilemma for
both Google and Facebook as we go down the “we are all broadcasters
now” path. How can they gather the signals that feed insight without
making decisions for the user about what is private, selectively shared
or public?
We, the people!
There is a discernible and growing reaction against both Facebook’s new
sharing paradigm and Google’s policy changes. As implicit sharing, or
as Sheryl Sandberg calls it, broadcasting, replaces conscious sharing,
many are growing disillusioned with Facebook taking liberties with
their behavior. The same instinct is making many people focus on the
assumed bad intent behind Google’s modifications. Broadcasting our
“real identity” is not something anybody wants as a default, and many
don’t want under any circumstances.
Privacy is becoming a product issue, not only a policy issue.
In the past privacy advocates on the Internet were primarily focused on
privacy as a policy issue, and the privacy lobby was mainly made up of
policy professionals. In the period since Facebook’s 2011 F8
conference, we have seen consumers begin to have strong opinions about
the use of their data. The past week has accelerated this trend.
Product managers now need to think long and hard about the assumptions
built into their products and ensure they are serving consumers not
just in words but in fact. Consumers are at a tipping pointy in not
tolerating all-inclusive policy decisions by service providers that
impact who sees their stuff.
Google and Facebook are between a rock and a hard place.
There is a big structural problem for both Google and Facebook as they
contemplate the product consequences of consumer reactions to their
product roadmap. In a centralized platform it is incredibly hard to
create easy-to-understand controls that give each user the ability to
control, at a granular level, what they share and who with. Grand
policy shifts, like that which came out of F8 and which we are now
seeing from Google, tend to assume all users are the same and will want
the same thing.
In reality, users are more complex. I might want to save a private
video to a personal storage space one moment, share something with a
select group of friends another moment, and broadcast something to the
world five minutes later. The web services infrastructure that both
Facebook and Google are based on does not easily permit such fine
grained control for users without also imposing serious effort. As we
all know, that leads users to stick with the default settings most of
the time.
So, despite good intent by the teams at both companies,
one-size-fits-all decisions are the norm.
Mobile to the rescue?
Structural problems usually require structural solutions. What it seems
consumers are asking for is a world in which we all know what we are
sharing and who with — but where we don’t have to do a huge amount of
work to achieve that. Google Circles seems to be a nod in this
direction as are Facebook’s groups. But neither is really easy enough
or sufficiently integrated into the flow of the products to really
solve the problem. Both require a huge management overhead.
As I argued earlier this week in “Google, Look Out Behind You!“, the
spread of smartphones may be part of the solution here. Hundreds of
millions of consumers are now carrying around connected still and video
cameras with lists of contacts in the address book, often already
organized into meaningful groups. Decentralized decision-making is very
easy when there are decentralized software clients under the unique
control of each user. The ability to be private one moment, selectively
share the next and then publicly broadcast a few minutes later is easy
to achieve in this decentralized software architecture. And service
providers can never become bad actors — simply because they do not own
our information or the full social graph. The cloud becomes a means of
delivering messages to the phones and the place where we store our
media. But it’s not the place we need to trust to make decisions about
what gets shared and who with.
Software can truly reflect the wishes of each human being in each
moment in this world. It couldn’t be structurally more different from
the past 10 years of centralized web services.
What’s Next?
Products will need to become increasingly more human as they become
more mobile. Privacy can go away as an issue if that happens. All
decisions about where data can travel will be able to be made by the
individual, each time they produce data. We will all be able to be
private, share selectively or choose to broadcast with relative ease.
We are moving to a period where it will be considered intrusive and
unwelcome if our service providers have any point of view about our
sharing behavior. “Just trust us” will not be necessary and certainly
won’t cut it. Capturing moments in one’s life, with the choice of
whether to share, and as importantly, who to share it with, will be in
the hands of each individual. The service provider will merely execute
the user’s wishes. If you think about it, it’s kind of like what email
service providers do today. I can’t wait.
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CrunchBase
* Google
+ Founded 1998
+ Overview Google is a multinational corporation that is
specialized in internet-related services and products. The
company’s product portfolio includes Google Search, which
provides users with access to information online; Knowledge
Graph that allows to search for things, people, or places as
well as builds systems recognizing speech and understanding
natural language; Google Now, which provides information …
+ Location Mountain View, CA
+ Categories Search, Email, Blogging Platforms, Information
Technology, Video Streaming, Software
+ Website http://www.google.com
+ Full profile for Google
* Facebook
+ Founded 2004
+ Overview Facebook is an online social networking service that
allows its users to connect with friends and family as well as
make new connections. It provides its users with the ability
to create a profile, update information, add images, send
friend requests, and accept requests from other users. Its
features include status update, photo tagging and sharing, and
more. Facebook’s profile structure includes …
+ Location Menlo Park, CA
+ Categories Social Media, Colleges, All Students, Identity,
Communities
+ Website http://www.facebook.com
+ Full profile for Facebook
* Sheryl Sandberg
+ Bio Sheryl Sandberg is chief operating officer at Facebook,
overseeing the firm's business operations. Prior to Facebook,
Sheryl was vice president of Global Online Sales and
Operations at Google, chief of staff for the United States
Treasury Department under President Clinton, a management
consultant with McKinsey & Company, and an economist with the
World Bank. Sheryl received a BA summa cum laude …
+ Full profile for Sheryl Sandberg
* Keith Teare
+ Bio Keith Teare is the Founder at the Palo Alto incubator,
Archimedes Labs. Archimedes was the original incubator for
TechCrunch and since 2011 has invested, accelerated or
incubated many Silicon valley startups including Quixey; M.dot
(sold to GoDaddy); Loop Surveys; DownTown and Weendy. He is
also CEO and founder of just.me 2014 Inc and ContextPlane Inc
- two of the incubated companies. Teare …
+ Full profile for Keith Teare
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Posted Jan 28, 2012
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