Kudos. This fixes my biggest criticism of Facebook. I'm going to be a lot more comfortable using it now. The moving target privacy policies are a bit of an issue still, but I'm willing to give them a half pass on that as the price of innovation.
If their PR department influences their engineers to implement features that I want, good for them. I'm not inclined to care which part of the organization made the proposal.
I think it's simple, facebook needed a good strategy because of all the shit that hit the fan in the recent past, so they put a fresh new face on it and spread the love of openness where they can afford it.
I'm fine with it, download or not it doesn't change my view of them. Any company that has that kind of information at its disposal is to be treated with caution.
Can't one treat faceook with caution and at the same time, enjoy their services, and sing their praises? I often praise entities while maintaining quite cautionate.
I think I understand what you mean: a critic generally wants to have his or her point of view understood and acted upon, to which you could conclude that they might ultimately want to be able to be silent.
EDIT: maybe I didn't understand what you mean ;)
However, I'd argue that a single act is really just a grand gesture. To expect to silence critics with such a gesture is unrealistic - and doesn't do anything to positively resolve the issues involved with any cause worth fighting for.
The privacy issues that Facebook might need to address are deep and wide ranging. Facebook instigates cultural change - it's the nature of that change which should be up for debate.
Okay, to a degree I'm playing semantics .. but silencing an opinion isn't the same as reaching a resolution. To 'quell' suggests a pointed action, which puts the purpose of quietening the critic's voice, above resolving the critic's concern.
You know, what exactly can Facebook do to make people like you happy?
Facebook has to make money to do this they have to have users to do this they have to make a good product to do this they have to hire good engineers and to do that they have to make money, oh and if they're super evil no one will want to work for them, let alone use their product
Facebook really isn't as evil as most of these comments make out, and the fact Facebook lets you download your data isn't good enough makes you, whatever the opposite of a fanboy is, to Facebook.
Can I download my data off Google? Flickr? Any other major consumer site? Amazon doesn't hold my hand if I want to move to another service.
If you assume anything non-evil that a company does is "because the PR says so" I pity your outlook on the world.
Here's what I think. I don't think Facebook is evil. I think Facebook is young and they're pushing the boundaries of the web, and sometimes - sometimes - they over step a line and do something wrong. And what do Facebook do? They apologize. They change the features. And it doesn't make any difference to people like you.
Oh and by the way, normal users don't give a shit about any of this.
"Hi, this is facebook, this time we've really learned from our past mistakes.
I know you've heard that before (several times in fact), but this time we actually mean it and we'll show you how and why.
To begin with, from now on we will detail the commercial activities that we engage in with your data and we will allow you to say yes/no to every individual transaction. We wouldn't be a commercial entity if we didn't find a way to make that to our advantage though, so here is the deal: Every time we have a commercial proposition you get a link in your email and a notice on your wall. You can configure to default 'accept', 'deny' or 'hold until confirmation'. If you default to accept and you do nothing the deal is on. If you default to 'deny' then the deal is off, unless you decide to accept anyway through the link on your wall. If you default to 'hold until confirmation' then you will only be able to proceed after the terms and conditions of this particular deal have been made clear to you and accepted by you through an extra confirmation step.
Our advantage in all this is that we hope you will visit facebook more frequently to check up on us.
Of course we hope that you will trust us with your data, but given our recent antics we fully understand if you want to put us 'on probation'.
As for the why part, we've decided that we'd rather make a bit less money in the sort term and be around in the long term as opposed to chasing you away or giving a competitor enough air-supply to make our lives miserable.
We sincerely apologize for our past behavior.
As another token of our newly found conscience we will create a board of 10,000 randomly selected users that get to vote on changes that will affect privacy in a negative way, the advice of this board will be binding on us. What with facebook now being larger than most countries we figure democracy is the best way forward. We're making this a sampled democracy rather than a representative one to limit the impact on the day-to-day dealings with our site, however if you want to you are always eligible to vote on any proposals the board votes on and your vote will count just as heavy as a board members.
