Intellectual Property Law

Facebook Founder Sees Contextual Privacy — when it’s his records decontextualized

By Wendy Seltzer

I’ve criticized Facebook lately for its new “beacon”-based advertising, using Facebook cookies to bring information from outside e-commerce transactions into the Facebook newsfeed. Rent a movie on Blockbuster.com and, unless you were watching carefully, Facebook would tell your friends you spent Friday night watching “The Blob.” In response to user protest, Facebook has now changed the notification sequence so that these external items don’t post until you acknowledge them, though there’s still no way to opt out globally.

My chief privacy complaint with the initial beacon model was the loss of context, a concern others raised as well . While you might have known that your movie choices weren’t secret — after all, Blockbuster has to get the movie to you — you might have expected your purchasing context to be separate from your social network. The choices you’d make provisioning for a rainy night at home might differ if you expected friends to be peeking in the windows, and it should be your explicit choice whether to open the blinds.

So it’s interesting that when Harvard rag 02138 posted documents, including Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s college application, produced in Facebook’s ongoing litigation with ConnectU, Zuckerberg wanted privacy and context. Citing “context,” Facebook asked a federal judge to order 02138 to remove the documents, which had been filed under seal and apparently erroneously disclosed. The court refused.

As the New York Times reports:

Facebook said in a statement Friday. ?One reason the court ordered certain documents? protection was to prevent exactly what has happened: misusing documents and taking documents out of context to sling mud.?

While I wouldn’t wish the unceremonious unsealing of college writings on anyone, I do hope Facebook pursues its new-found interest in contextual privacy. What’s appropriate to one setting isn’t necessarily appropriate for all.

Full post as published by Legal Tags on December 03, 2007 (boomark / email).