Internet Ethics: Views From Silicon Valley

Good friends understand boundaries and keep your secrets.  You can’t be good friends with someone you don’t trust.

Facebook, the company that made “friend” a verb and invited you to mix together your bosom buddies, relatives, acquaintances, classmates, lovers, co-workers, exes, teachers, and who-knows-who-else into one group it called “friends,” and has been helping you stay in touch with all of them and prompting you to reveal lots of things to all them, is taking some steps to become more trustworthy.

Specifically, as TechCrunch and others recently reported, as of April 30 Facebook’s modified APIs will no longer allow apps to collect data both from their users and from their users’ Facebook “friends”—something they often did until now, often without the users (or their friends) realizing it.*

As TechCrunch’s Josh Constine puts it, “Some users will see [this] as a positive move that returns control of personal data to its rightful owners. Just because you’re friends with someone, doesn’t mean you necessarily trust their judgment about what developers are safe to deal with. Now, each user will control their own data destiny.” Moreover, with Facebook’s new APIs, each user will have more “granular control” over what permissions he or she grants to an app in terms of data collection or other actions—such as permission to post to his or her Newsfeed. Constine writes that

Facebook has now instituted Login Review, where a team of its employees audit any app that requires more than the basic data of someone’s public profile, list of friends, and email address. The Login Review team has now checked over 40,000 apps, and from the experience, created new, more specific permissions so developers don’t have to ask for more than they need. Facebook revealed that apps now ask an average of 50 percent fewer permissions than before.

These are important changes, specifically intended by Facebook to increase user trust in the platform. They are certainly welcome steps. However, Facebook might ponder the first line of Constine’s TechCrunch article, which reads, “It was always kind of shady that Facebook let you volunteer your friends’ status updates, check-ins, location, interests and more to third-party apps.” Yes, it was. It should have been obvious all along that users should “control their own data destiny.” Facebook’s policies and lack of clarity about what they made possible turned many of us who used it into somewhat inconsiderate “friends.”

Are there other policies that continue to have that effect? So many of our friendship-related actions are now prompted and shaped by the design of the social platforms on which we perform them—and controlled even more by algorithms such as the Facebook one that determines which of our friends’ posts we see in our Newsfeed (no, they don’t all scroll by in chronological order; what you see is a curated feed, in which the parameters for curation are not fully disclosed and keep changing).

Facebook might be becoming a better, more trustworthy friend (though a “friend” that, according to The Atlantic, made $5 billion last year by showing you ads, “more than [doubling] digital ad revenue over the course of two years”). Are we becoming better friends, though, too? Or should we be clamoring for even more transparency and more changes that would empower us to be that?

*  We warned about this practice in our Center’s module about online privacy: “Increasingly, you may… be allowing some entities to collect a lot of personal information about all of your online ‘friends’ by simply clicking ‘allow’ when downloading applications that siphon your friends' information through your account. On the flip side, your ‘friends’ can similarly allow third parties to collect key information about you, even if you never gave that third party permission to do so.” Happily, we’ll have to update that page now…