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Viral Radio: Facebook Flap

October 21, 2010 at 1:18 am PT

Here’s a radio interview BoomTown did earlier this week on San Francisco’s KQED “Forum” show, hosted by Michael Krasny.

The topic was a report in the The Wall Street Journal that certain third-party apps on Facebook were grabbing information about users in ways that violated the social networking site’s privacy guidelines.

Privacy advocates cried foul, while others thought it was more a tempest in a teapot– which I, NPR reporter Laura Sydell and Marc Rotenberg, executive director for the Electronic Privacy Information Center, discussed.

One conclusion, which you will understand after listening: Facebook definitely does not cause cancer.

Here’s the audio:

Tagged with: advocate, advocates, app, audio, BoomTown, California, digital, Electronic Privacy Information Center, EPIC, Facebook, guideline, information, Internet, interview, Kara Swisher, KQED, Laura Sydell, Marc Rotenberg, Michael Krasny, NPR, privacy, radio, report, San Francisco, show, social networking, The Wall Street Journal, third party, user, users, viral

comments so far. Add yours.

http://www.slimgamer.com/ SlimGamer

No one should feel sorry for Facebook, instead I’m surprised the site gets so much bad press everytime something gets exploited. When something gets popular, every little thing matters. Does anyone even remember MySpace?
http://twitter.com/jdp23 Jon Pincus

I’m not sure why you keep saying “overwrought” and “unfair”. When I look at the essence of what’s happened:

- Facebook has repeatedly told users none of their personal information will be shred with their advertisers

- All of the top apps, including Zynga, shared the users’ Facebook name, their list of friends, and their friends’ names with advertisers without their consent, in violation of their policy

As you say, there’s a pattern here. Facebook has once again blatantly lied to its users. Why are so many people making excuses for them?

Legally, it may or may not be a legal violation of their toothless privacy policy. Marc’s got a great point about industry self-regulation: TRUSTe has already said “nothing we can do”. Facebook said “everybody should stop doing that” but otherwise hasn’t discussed any actions they’ve taken against their partners like Zynga. So it’ll get added to the various lawsuits and reluctant-to-ask government privacy investigations against the companies in the US around the world.

It’s a great analogy to the early days of smoking cigarettes when nobody knew that the tobacco companies were faking and hiding data, and lying about the harm their product caused. Over time we’ll understand the damage as their users get denied health insurance and lose jobs because they trusted Facebook.

Do you think the downside risk of multi-billion dollar class action lawsuits, disgraced executives, and angry lawmakers is priced into Facebook’s current $33B valuation?