Law Students

some data points on facebook

By Luis Villa

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.

Full post as published by Luis Villa's Home Page on May 14, 2010 (boomark / email).