Unintended consequences of Facebook

Pre-Facebook, the very phrase “social media consultant” would have produced only blank stares from the typical layman.
Now, people like Marcia Conner make their living advising companies on how to use Facebook and other social networking sites.
“The work I do focuses on helping organisations to use social technologies to connect the people in their organisations,” Conner, a partner in the Altimeter Group and author of the forthcoming book The New Social Learning: A Guide to Transforming Organisations Through Social Media, said.
“They are complementary technologies that can be used to get that same sort of community feeling.”
In short, if there’s a company with 10,000 people, social networking can be a way to help workers who are doing mutually beneficial things to know of each other’s work and to get in touch to share ideas and skills.
But Facebook offered up an even more obvious application – marketing.
As David Kirkpatrick, author of The Facebook Effect: The Inside Story of the Company that is Connecting the World, noted, companies could use the site for advertising and marketing “based on the extremely exact demographic data volunteered by the individual”.
Before Facebook, their efforts were based on a mixture of educated guessing and expensive research. Now, there is an audience that makes itself a target.
Of course, the number of users and the volume of information they have volunteered is part of what has exposed Facebook to an ongoing assault by privacy activists.
Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s founder, recently said: “We are building towards a web where the default is social.”
But this move towards default sharing of information has earned plenty of criticism.
Facebook made changes to privacy settings at the end of last year. It then provoked a storm in April with plans to share information with third-party sites and promptly had to announce changes.
“One of the patterns that has emerged is that Facebook makes a set of changes and walks those back a bit after the backlash,” Kurt Opsahl, senior staff lawyer at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, said.
“Facebook has been using a mode of asking for forgiveness rather than permission, leading to this progression over the years.”
 Facebook’s defenders were not convinced by the idea that it disrespects privacy, or that the typical user was anxious, Kirkpatrick said.
“Most users are not aware there is a privacy controversy,” he said.
He pointed to the example of his own 18-year-old daughter, who understands as much about privacy controls as she needs to.
“My wife and I cannot see anything. She is using the privacy controls simply not to let her parents see. She couldn’t care less about the controversies.”
But Opsahl believed Facebook needed to make simpler privacy controls and to accept that default settings should not be changed in the way they have been.
“What users really want is control over their information, a sense of knowing where their information is going and how they can decide what context the information is appearing.”
If you start out with a networking space for students, it’s not necessarily the most obvious step to see the possibility of a tool for campaigning.
And yet, Facebook has provided an opportunity for a wide variety of groups to attempt to build support for a cause.
At one end of the spectrum, it has been used to get Rage Against the Machine to the top of the pop charts in the UK. At the other, it is vital for serious political campaigns.
From the disputed Iranian elections to action against BP over the Gulf of Mexico oilspill, the Facebook group is the first port of call for many.
“Even though it might not have been intended on day one, fairly early on Facebook was a political platform,” Kirkpatrick said. “Its creators were interested in that.”
The sheer size of Facebook was something that could not have been predicted at the beginning, Kirkpatrick said.
Many of the problems that are identified with Facebook are symptomatic of a company which only has a couple of thousand employees to serve half a billion users. – BBC