Friend portability is the must-have Facebook regulation – TechCrunch
Choice for Consumers forcing fair treatment of companies. When people can easily move to a competitor, it creates a natural market dynamically forcing a business to act properly. When we can't, other rules give us just caught with a pig in a fresh layer of lipstick.
That's why the FTC considers how many billions to fine Facebook or which leaders to keep personal responsibility, or to go full tilt and break up the company, I ask to consider the root of How Facebook Gets Abused By Abusing User Privacy: There is no easy way to switch to an alternative.
If Facebook users are tired of the surveillance, security breaches, fake news or hate, there is no Western general social network with scale to join. Twitter is too concise public content, Snapchat is too volatile communication. Tumblr is neglected. Google+ is dead. Instagram is owned by Facebook. And the rest is either Chinese, one-time or small.
No, I don't expect the FTC to launch its own "Fedbook" social network. But what it can do is to pave a escape route from Facebook, so worthy alternatives become viable alternatives. Therefore, the FTC must require Facebook to provide truly interoperable data portability for the social graph.
In other words, the government should pass regulations that compel Facebook to let you export your friend list to other social networks in a secure manner. This will allow you to connect or follow these people elsewhere so you can leave Facebook without losing touch with your friends. The increased threat that people who die Facebook for competitors will create a much stronger incentive to protect users and communities.
Slate of possible regulations for Facebook, now being discussed by the FTC's heads, includes a $ 3 billion to $ 5 billion or less, Facebook CEO personally liable for breach of an FTC callback, and creates new privacy and compliance positions, including A CEO who can be filled by Zuckerberg, establishes an independent supervisory committee to review privacy and product decisions, according to the New York Times and the Washington Post. More extreme measures such as limiting how Facebook collects and uses data for ad targeting, blocking future acquisitions, or turning up the company are still possible, but apparently less likely.
Facebook founder Chris Hughes (right) recently wrote a scathing conversation to break up Facebook.
Breaking apart Facebook is a compelling punishment for the company's mistakes. Still, I agree with Zuckerberg's response to co-founder Chris Hughes' call to split up the company, which he said "should not do anything to help", and simply fix Facebook's privacy or misinformation. Given Facebook probably would not try to make more major social network acquisitions during all of this investigation, it would benefit from voluntary laws not to try these purchases for at least three to five years. Otherwise, regulators could impose that ban, which can be politically achievable with fewer messy downstream effects,
Nevertheless, without this data portability regulation, Facebook can pay a fine and return to business as usual. It can accept additional privacy monitoring without fundamentally changing its product. It can be responsible for maintaining the law's only letter while still violating the spirit. And even though it was broken, users could still not switch from Facebook to Instagram, or from Instagram and WhatsApp to a new location.
Facebook Kills Competition With User Lock-In
When faced with competition in the past, Facebook has embarked on action to improve itself. Feared Google+ in 2011, Zuckerberg promised "Carthage must be destroyed" and the company encrypted to launch Messenger, Timeline Profile, Graph Search, Photo Enhancements and more. Having realized the importance of mobile in 2012, Facebook redesigned its app, reorganized its teams, and demanded that employees wear Android phones for "dogfooding" testing. And when Snapchat still grew fast to a rival, Facebook cloned its stories and now adopts the philosophy of ephemerality.
Mark Zuckerberg visualizes his social graph at a Facebook conference
Every time Facebook felt threatened, it was asked to improve its product for consumers. But once it had defeated its competitors, their growth slowed, or restricted them to a niche purpose, aggravated Facebook's privacy policy. Anti-trust scholar Dina Srinivasan explains this in her summary of her paper "Anti-Trust Case Against Facebook":
"When dozens of companies competed in an attempt to gain market share and all competing products were priced at zero privacy Quickly portrayed as a key researcher, when Facebook entered the market, it specifically promised users: "We do not use cookies to collect private information from some users." The competition not only hindered Facebook's ability to track users, which prevented every social network from trying to engage in this behavior … the end of the competition greenlit a change in the behavior of the only surviving firm.In the beginning of 2014, dozens of competitors who basically competed with Facebook had effectively released the market. In June 2014, rival Google announced that it would shut down its competitive social network and cut the social network the work market to Facebook.
For Facebook, network effects of more than one billion users on a closed communication protocol were further locked in the market in their favor. These conditions – the end of the competition and consumer lock-in – allowed Facebook to get consumers to agree on something they had resisted from the beginning. Almost simultaneously with Google's exit, Facebook (also in June 2014) announced that it would begin to track users' behavior on websites and applications over the Internet and use the data obtained from such monitoring to target and influence consumers. Shortly afterwards, non-users began to track as well. It uses the "like" buttons and other software licenses to do so. "
Therefore, the FTC must seek regulation that not only penalizes Facebook for errors, but it allows consumers to do the same. Users can punch Facebook by leaving, both deprived of ad revenue and reducing the network effect for others Empowering them with the opportunity to take their friends list with them gives the users a higher seat at the table.I ask what the University of Chicago professors Luigi Zingales and Guy Rolnik called a social data portability law.
Fortunately, Facebook already has a framework For this data portability through a feature called Find Friends, you connect your Facebook account to another app and you can find your Facebook friends already on that app.
But the problem is that Facebook has previously blocked competitors from Using Find Friends It includes cutting Twitter, Vine, Voxer and MessageMe, while Phhhoto was blocked from letting you find your Instagram friends … six months before Instag ram copied Phhhoto's core back and forth GIF function and called it Boomerang. Then there is the problem that you need an active Facebook account to use Find Friends. It nullifies the tool as a way to bring your social graph with you when you leave Facebook.
Facebook's "Find Friends" feature used to let Twitter users follow their Facebook friends, but Facebook later canceled access for competitors, including Twitter and Vine seen here
The social network offers a way to "Last down your information, which is useful for exporting photos, status updates, messages and other data about you. Nevertheless, the buddy list can only be exported as a text list of names in HTML or JSON format. The names are not associated with their associated Facebook profiles or any unique identifier, so there is no way to find your friend John Smith among anyone with that name on another app. And less than 5 percent of my 2800 connections had used it little known option to allow friends to export their email address. How about the big "Data Transfer Project" Facebook announced 10 months ago in collaboration with Google, Twitter and Microsoft to provide more portability? It has not released anything so far, and questions whether it was vaporware designed to avert regulators.
This essentially means that Facebook provides zero portability for your friendships. That's what regulators have to change. There is already a precedent for this. The Telecommunications Act of 1996 said that the FCC requires telephone operators to allow customers to easily port their number to another operator than having to assign a new number. If you think of a phone number as a method that your friends associate with you, it would be reasonable for regulators to declare that the modern equivalent – your friends to social networking – must be equally portable.
How to remove your friendships [19659011] Facebook must be required to allow you to export a truly compatible friends list that can be imported to other programs in a secure manner.
To do so, Facebook should allow you to download a version of the list. This feature has had versions of the phone numbers and email addresses of the friends who used to register. You will not be able to read this contact information or import and spam peoples. But Facebook may be required to share documentation education developers with other apps to build a feature that cross-checks the raised numbers and email addresses securely against those who have signed up for their app. That the developer would not be able to read the contact information from Facebook either, or save useful data about people who had not signed up for their app. However, if the phone number or email address of someone in your exported Facebook friend list matches one of the users, they can offer you to contact or follow them.
This system allows you to store your social graph, delete Facebook account, and find your friends on other apps without harming your privacy contact information. Users would no longer be locked into Facebook and could freely choose to move their friendships to the social network they treat best. And Facebook would not be able to block competitors from using it.
If the company wanted to go one step further, it could offer opportunities to make content settings for news material or Facebook groups connected, for example, by making it easier for Group members to log in to a parallel e-mail list. mail or text message. For researchers, Facebook can offer opportunities to export anonymized news feed and activity data for studies.
Portability will to a greater extent adapt the goals of users, Facebook and the regulators. Facebook would not only be responsible for the government to technically comply with new fines, supervision or liability. It will eventually have to compete to provide the best social app instead of relying on the networking effect of handcuff users for their service.
This same model of data portability regulation can be extended to any app with over 1 billion users, or even 100 million users to secure YouTube, Twitter, Snapchat or Reddit, nor could lock users down. By simply applying the rule to apps with a sufficiently large user base, the regulation would not prevent new start-ups for the market and accidentally create a moat around well-financed established businesses such as Facebook, which can afford engineering. Data portability regulation combined with fines, responsibilities, supervision and bans on future acquisitions of social networks can put Facebook right without breaking it up.
Users have many complaints about Facebook that goes beyond strict privacy. But their use is always limited because too many features are nowhere to go, and it's too difficult to go there. By fixing the latter, the FTC can stimulate the upbringing of Facebook options so that users rather regulators can play king.
