Facebook’s Biggest Problem is Trust

I’ve been reading tonnes and tonnes about Facebook in the past week or so. The pressure on them from the press and users who are concerned with privacy is mounting. Facebook recently held an internal staff meeting to discuss the threat of privacy concerns to its image.

In other words, privacy concerns are becoming bad for business.

Facebook wants to have all of your information open because then it’s accessible to advertisers. 400 million people to sell to, how could anyone say no to that? What Facebook clearly doesn’t understand is that users’ trust is far more important than what information they can extract from you. Google is a company that also lives off of your information. You enter ‘œcoffee London’ in its search engine and boom, they know you like coffee (Starbucks ads) and that you live in London (ads for a local hotel perhaps?). Think about everything you’ve ever entered into Google. Most of it will be mundane, but some of it, for whatever reason, will be private. Some of it will be embarrassing, intimate and maybe plain wrong.

Now imagine if Google, who started out as a company that won’t display your searches, decided that from today all of your searches were publicly available. Everyone could see what you searched for; perhaps you searched for “Labour party” or “Republican party” a large number of times? Google, and now the world, knows your political persuasion. Maybe you searched for ‘porn’? Everyone could see that too. You’d be pissed, right? An uproar would occur so large that the internet would simply break. With Buzz, Google let other people see your Gmail contacts and look at the response they got.

Except Google understands that its core business is based on you trusting them. “Don’t be evil”, the cute name and colourful letters, they all say “it’s cool, we’re your friend”. To highlight my point even further; Google pulled out of China to regain your trust. It, for four years, didn’t care that China was censoring results, then once people’s Gmail accounts got hacked (or once they noticed), they suddenly regained a sense of moral solidarity. China was a significant market to Google, but because they were so concerned with people not trusting them to enter intimate information about themselves, they stopped trading with an entire country.

Google needs your trust. Its business model is based on it. But so is Facebook’s.

Facebook is Google, but centralised. You don’t disparately enter “coffee London”, you list that you live in London and that you “Like’” coffee. You list your age, your sexual preference, your political beliefs, your interests, your education level, your friends and then you tell them (through status updates) what you’re doing right that second.

So not only does Facebook have all of that information (which it can use to slot you into a socio-economic group) it knows that right now, you’re looking for coffee. It knows that you’re 21, it knows that you’re university educated; it knows that you’re left-leaning; it knows that you have interest in politics, art and culture. With this information it serves you up an ad for Starbucks because it knows there’s a Starbucks in London, it knows the demographic of a Starbucks customer which you fit into and it knows you want coffee, now. And all this information, which can slot you into a nicely formatted demographic, is public.

That requires an awful lot of user trust does it not? For the default setting to be ‘œshow me to the world’, the user has to trust Facebook to protect that information in the same way we trust Google enough to tell it our searches. Except a lot of people don’t know that they are giving this information away, and the people who do are increasingly more petrified of the effect Facebook is having on privacy.

Facebook haven’t yet, but will some day be forced to, figure out what Google learned a long time ago: That their business model isn’t based on a lack of privacy, on extracting and displaying users’ information, its model is making people trust you enough that they don’t mind telling you. Brazenly throwing open the doors of your profile is a brute-force approach to selling users’ information. Making them comfortable, aware and happy for them to tell the world their political beliefs or sexual preference is a much better, long term solution to the issue. Or, crucially, they don’t tell you. And you have to be happy, and fundamentally make it easy, to facilitate that too.

Facebook needs to become transparent. It needs to explain to users who don’t know what the issues are and then make it so easy for them to either carry on as they were or opt-out and prevent their information being publicly accessed. This would change the perception of Facebook as a company to one who has no understanding of privacy to one that acknowledges people’s concerns and gives people a clear, simple choice.