techcafeteria

Join me for some nptech chatter on my first NYC trip in 30 years, Thursday night at the Heartland Brewery, Empire State Building location (350 5th Ave.), 6:00 pm to whenever.

Doesn’t it figure that this would arrive after this morning’s post?

As a happy, active member of the Nonprofit Technology Network (NTEN), I’ve made a difficult decision: family and work commitments are too high this year to afford a trip to DC and NTEN’s annual Nonprofit Technology Conference (NTC). Since most of my family and pretty much all of my wife’s family live 1,000 to 3,000 miles away from us, visiting takes up a lot of the vacation time I get. NTC is, to my mind, a marginally work-related activity, in it that I do bring resources and knowledge back to my employer every year, but the bulk of what I get out of and go to NTC for isn’t all that work-related. Because, let’s face it: NTC is the best party of the year, hands down. And I’m far more likely to be imparting info there, and engaging in what I call my “extra-curricular activities” than focusing on Earthjustice-related topics.

What am I going to miss? Oh my word.

For me, the fun begins about a day before the conference does, with the annual NTC Beer Bash (that Carie Lewis will be organizing in my absence) kicking the conference off. Established two years ago, we get 30 to 50 of the early arrivers together at the brewpub with the best selection of craft beers we can find together and kick off the socializing early.

Day of Service. Another pre-conference tradition, the Day of Service links nptech professionals with local charities for four hours of expertise sharing and volunteer activities. There’s usually some big project, like installing wireless at a community center, and many opportunities for smal consulting sessions.

The Tech Track. Started last year, the Tech Track is a selection of breakout sessions designed for the people that do what i do for a living—install and support the technology that, in turn, supports the mission. NTC is a great place to develop a social media strategy or learn the latest online fundraising techniques, and it’s now also a reliable source for solid advice on how to virtualize your server room or move the whole thing to the cloud.

Holly Ross and the NTEN Staff. Simply put, Holly + Co are to nonprofit technology conference planning as Buffy and the Scoopy Gang are to vampire slaying. They not only nail it, but they do it all with wit, humanity and style. NTC is the best tech conference. Period. And that’s completely attributable to the brilliant work NTEN does combining awesome people, great knowledge, and a wealth of activities into three days of absolute fun. As I always say. you can’t go to NTC and not meet people. I make new friends every time.

Sadly, my ambitious agenda at work and some family matters have left no room for my favorite annual event this year. I’ve made the last six and I intend to be at the next six. So go and have a great time for me!

Robert Egger’s brilliant response to Rush Limbaugh’s recent diatribe against nonprofit employees. is a must watch, particularly the last five seconds or so, which neatly sum it up. Limbaugh claims that nonprofit employees are “lazy idiots” and “rapists” of the economy. Wow, like what he does for a living is so healthy…

This a month or so after a madman was stopped on the Golden Gate bridge in San Francisco with a car full of weapons, headed to kill people at the ACLU and the Tides Foundation. Both of these organizations work to protect people’s rights, the ACLU being the better known of the two. Lesser known Tides’ mission is to promote social justice and maintain a healthy, sustainable environment. Why did the killer target them?

Glenn Beck makes his living by standing in front of a blackboard and espousing paranoid-inducing theories about democratic cabals aimed at destroying the American way of life.  His rants have succeeded in getting White House officials, such as Van Jones, removed, and, along with other Fox News conspirators, ACORN, a voter registration organization, disbanded.  In the first case, the White House, shamefully, asked Jones to resign in the face of all of the ridiculous criticism.  In the second, Fox News aired doctored footage alleging that ACORN helped pimps and prostitutes, creating falsified scandals that drove the nonprofit under.  ACORN was investigated, and the investigation found some evidence of tax evasion and questionable destruction of documents, but, notably, absolutely no consulting on prostitution practices or, as was widely alleged, improper handling of voter registrations. But all of this started when Beck chose them—as he did with Tides—as fodder for his unsubstantiated and false conspiracy theories.

I sum up Limbaugh’s comments as his standard, poorly-thought out rambling.  He meant some particular nonprofit or sort of nonprofit, and chose far too broad a term to make a lucid point.  But I question whether Limbaugh is ever capable of making lucid points. If we didn’t have the evidence of the bust for Oxycontin abuse, it wouldn’t be hard to still recognize drug-addled behavior.

What Beck does is far more insidious and dangerous. Like Limbaugh, he’s not concerned at all with honestly portraying the people and groups he discusses.  He’s building a narrative, one that the viewers can watch and feel that they have a special stake in, relayed by his tear-filled eyes and cautioning tone. This intimate dialogue is really engaging.  But Beck is entirely unwilling to be accountable for the lies that he spreads, even when they come close to inspiring mass murder.

It’s completely unintuitive and bizarre that nonprofits—poorly resourced organizations that struggle to do the work that our government does less and less of—are lambasted and threatened by the people that rally loudest for eliminating government programs.  We’re the ones who are getting important work done with funding that is volunteered, not assessed.  Most nonprofits have no leftist or rightwing agenda—they have clearly stated missions that they’re trying to serve (as Egger’s video makes clear).  Maybe Beck and Limbaugh should be a bit more appreciative of the fact that we enable mouths to be fed, museums and parks to stay open, and air to continue to be breathable in a country where the government can get fewer and fewer social services funded.

Today is the fifth anniversary of this blog, which was started on May 20, 2005.  Back then, it was on another website and not very well-defined. I’d say my purpose in starting it was pretty much “because I should be blogging”. After a year or two, though, I started to find my voice by discussing what I do: nonprofit technology. And then I registered Techcafeteria, the personal arm what I call my “extra curricular activities” beyond family and the day job.

Things didn’t really take off until the fall of 2008, when I stated blogging elsewhere. Many of the posts here are republished from the Idealware Blog, which I now run. Accordingly, the Techcafeteria-only posts tend to be housekeeping ones (like this one); way off of NPO technology topics (such as my more political and personal entries) and overflow, because, while I write regularly for Idealware, I find myself with more things to write about than would be appropriate to flood that blog with, at times. I’ve definitely hit my stride, and expect this to continue to be a steady source of content for some time to come. But, if all you really want is the technology stuff, and could care less about whether we homeschool or how I feel about civil rights, you might be happier subscribing to Idealware, which has the benefits of a stricter focus and nine additional excellent bloggers contributing.

Over the years, a handful of my posts have either gained notoriety or stood out in terms of synthesizing some of my key messages, so I thought I’d re-recommend them. Here’s my best of the first five years list:

• Message to The Krazy.com Spammer – I occasionally write missives to people who will never read them. I’m particularly fond of this one, based entirely on a true story.


• Schlock and Oh! Facebook’s Social Dysfunction – This is timely: My initial reaction to Facebook, after reluctantly signing up.  I’ve been bashing them since 2007.  (Take note, Jon Looper!)


• The Lean, Green, Virtualized Machine – I took a stab at explaining the geeky concept of virtualization in relatively plain english, and I think I nailed it.


• Why We Tweet – In case you were wondering.


• The ROI On Flexibility – I consider this to be the best thing I’ve written, a synthesis of my philosophy on technology management and my standard rant against IT control freakishness.


• Why Sharepoint Scares Me – I think I hit the corporate zeitgeist with a post that doesn’t slam Microsoft’s collaborative platform, but catalogs the things about it that might be difficult for nonprofits to deal with.


• Why We Homeschool – Homeschooling gets a really bad rap, and, as parents who have determined, for good reasons, that it’s the right path for our kid, we deal with a lot of flack and misconceptions.


• The Offensive Bardwell Defense – Keith Bardwell was a Louisiana Justice of the Peace who refused to marry interracial couples on the grounds that it was unfair “to the children”.  As is gay marriage.  As is any hatred-based viewpoint that a bigot desperately wants to justify and defend.  On a side note, I’m pretty sure that this is the article that spawned a ton of traffic from Sean Hannity’s website.  I hope it was educational for those visitors!


• Why Geeks (Like Me) Promote Transparency – In order to obtain funding and improve effectiveness, NPOs are going to have to start managing and sharing their outcome data. This is a big theme of mine, and this post said it well.

It’s been a productive five years.  Here’s to the next five at Techcafeteria!

Following is a guest post from Jon Loomer, offering a different perspective on Facebook’s privacy changes.

Jon Loomer’s career has evolved from overseeing Fantasy Basketball product, content, marketing and promotion for the National Basketball Association to his current position as VP of Strategic Marketing for a non-profit. His focus is on social media strategy, Facebook and mobile development. You can follow him on Twitter @JonLoomer or read his blog focused on the subject of baseball atTippingPitches.blogspot.com. The following opinions are his only and do not reflect those of his affiliations.

It took a few weeks, but internet rage over Facebook’s Like button and latest privacy ramifications is in full swing. Bloggers swinging at Facebook’s knee caps with aluminum bats seem to outnumber those who come to CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s defense 20:1. And if a blogger does post a defense, duck and cover as soon as you hit “publish” because the rage will bubble up from the comments section.

So when Peter asked me if I’d be interested in writing a guest post on his blog in defense of Facebook’s changes, I had mixed emotions. On one hand, I’m absolutely flattered that he’d ask. On the other, I’m uncomfortable taking a hugely unpopular stand. The position is so unpopular that it ventures into “controversial” territory. Can I post anonymously?

I’m not a controversial dude. And any controversial opinions I have, I tend to keep relatively private, restricted to my inner circle.

But here’s the irony: I share these “controversial” opinions on Facebook. And I only share them with a small group of friends by using lists. But to the outer circle, I’m a harmless guy without much flare for the dramatic.

You must be outraged!

I may avoid controversy, but Facebook feeds off of it. Everywhere I turn, I read another blog telling me how angry I should be with Facebook’s dangerous disregard for my privacy. And because of this, a small part of me is trying to convince the rest of me that I, too, need to be outraged. But I can’t conjure up the energy.

The Utility of Facebook
First a little background on me as a Facebook user. I’ve used Facebook since it rolled out to the non-student public in 2006. My company partnered with Facebook on an application for that initial launch. So I’ve been there from “the beginning.”

And I’ve also been there through a multitude of changes, some vertical and some lateral. No matter how major the changes were, they were controversial. And the uproars increased as the Facebook population screamed past 100, 200, 300 and 400 Million.

This undoubtedly has something to do with my lack of rage now. I’ve become numb to the anger. Whether it’s a Facebook change or any other controversial revelation, I try to remain level headed. Before I react negatively to Facebook’s changes in particular, I try them out for a while. Think about the end game and why they’d make the change. And when I read a rumor about how Facebook is going to charge a monthly fee, or that they allow pedophiles to access my profile, I research first.

While I haven’t agreed with every change Facebook has made, I still recognize that they have made gradual improvements over the course of the past four years that have resulted in a much better overall product. The navigation is vastly improved, and I have far greater control now over who sees what and when.

Sure, some things (name, profile photo, gender, current city, networks, friends, pages) are available to the public now. But these are not things that bother me. You could already pull up photos of my handsome mug (here, here, here and here) by running a Google search. I’d hope my gender is obvious. And although I did scale down my pages after they became publicly viewable, I am now comfortable sharing those interests with anyone who cares.

After that, I’ve always used my privacy settings. Status by status, link by link, photo by photo, I pick and choose my audience. There are times when I keep what I share to a small audience of “Good Friends.” There are others when I share with all of my friends, some of whom I don’t know. And still others, I’ll feel the need to share with “Everyone,” as in—shudder—everyone on the Internet.

But I also use Twitter. I maintain a blog. So there are certain things I’m used to sharing with everyone. And when I share with the world, I have a reason for doing so.

It’s because of this control that I find Facebook extremely useful. I can contact just about anyone from my 500+ connections in an instant. I can promote my blog or share my son’s lemonade stand to raise money for childhood cancer research. Or I can simply goof off casually with friends. But it’s all controlled.

I also control what it is that third party developers see and what my friends can share about me. Developers can access everything that is already available to the public (which isn’t a whole lot), and my friends can’t share much more than that about me either. So I leave enough available for most useful applications to work, but without giving away more than I am comfortable.

The New Features
So all that said, Facebook rolled out a few features recently that were said to impact my privacy. I personally found them to be brilliant. I knew there would be backlash (there always is), but I admit I didn’t expect anything at this scale.

The Like Button: This addition has essentially made millions of web pages an extension of Facebook. The collage of my friends’ faces acts as a welcome mat at the front door of sites that are new to me. My friend likes this? Let me check it out. My friend says I should go to this restaurant? Not a bad idea. These are things that I would have otherwise seen on Facebook, but now I see them at the source to provide more relevance.

Not only is the Like button good for me as a user, but it is also good for me from the business side—both on my blog (loosely defined as a business) and my organization’s web pages. I’ve quickly realized that users are much more inclined to click a Like button than go through the process of retweeting or even sharing through Facebook. It’s easy. It’s awesome.

Instant Personalization: Policies aside (we’ll get to this later), I love the idea. I can go to Pandora and immediately access music that I like or my friends like. I can go to Yelp and immediately find a restaurant that they recommend. There is so much to like here. It makes the web a warmer, more social, and more relevant place.

Updated Privacy Settings: This has caused a stir, but it really wasn’t a problem for me. As I mentioned before, I’ve always been on top of my privacy. So when the new privacy settings were rolled out, I took my time to make sure everything was set up the way I wanted. While some may claim that Facebook pulled a fast one on us, it’s not as if this was done discretely without you knowing. You were forced to go through the new settings and verify. Might it have been a bit overwhelming? Maybe. But if you care about your privacy like I do, it’s something you should understand.

Community Pages: This one has been run more on the down low because it is a beta product. Thousands of community pages have been created by Facebook and some general pages have been converted (often to the dismay of the administrator). Unlike the typical Facebook page, there is no admin control (at least for now) of the community page. It is, apparently, intended to be a wiki of some sort, with information fed by people’s content who like the page. It’s not clear yet what value, if any, these pages have, but the usage is likely to evolve.

The Confusion
Part of Facebook’s problem is that this new Facebook-centered web can be a bit startling at first. When you go to another website, you don’t expect to see a list of your Facebook friends who like something. You don’t expect a website you did not previously visit to know what you like and don’t like to make recommendations. But people need to simply look at the web as an extension of Facebook, particularly when using social plug-ins. Instead of viewing that your friend likes an ESPN article in your Facebook feed, you see it on ESPN.com. It’s not as if the world can see this information. What you see is different than what I see. And your privacy settings still apply, which may not be immediately obvious.

There is also confusion because there are very few blogs and articles being written on this subject that equally weigh the issue. Many make it seem as though all of our private content is at risk; that no matter how we adjust our privacy settings, everything is available to the world. They are biased towards negativity and rage because that’s what brings traffic. We are told to either delete our Facebook profiles or simply put them on lock-down, preventing everyone from seeing anything, disallowing instant personalization, and blocking as much information from third parties as possible.

The reality, at least as far as I can tell, is that the latest changes won’t harm you if you are already on top of your privacy settings and careful about what you share. But based on the media coverage, it would be easy for someone to overreact and go with the flock.

Show Me
This is my biggest problem with the outrage over Facebook’s changes: Almost everything I read is in abstract terms. Please, show me the danger of Facebook’s changes. You’ve probably seen this example of Facebook users who have told the world, knowingly or not, that they have cheated on a test. Well, I can do the same with Twitter users. What’s the point?

Maybe I should feel bad for people who unknowingly publish embarrassing information about themselves for the world to see, but I don’t. For many reasons.

First, let’s not fall for the claim that Facebook made this radical change from closed to open overnight. The latest change did allow search engine indexing of your public profile (if you kept the box checked to allow it) or of that information you shared with “everyone,” but keep in mind that the former definition of “everyone” was all users on Facebook. So you went from sharing embarrassing photos and information about yourself to 400 Million people to the entire world. Eh.

And again, Facebook forced us—all of us—to confirm our privacy settings. Did you ignore them? If you did, should I feel bad for you? Eh.

I understand that I don’t represent all Facebook users, and that’s a very good argument for anyone opposed to the changes. Most people do not spend the time refining their privacy. And many may simply be confused by the settings.

Still, if you’re confused, just restrict everything as much as possible. I keep seeing stats on number of settings and options, but if you just set everything to “Friends” (and your friends truly are your friends), you’ll be fine. Assuming, of course, you’re still careful about what you share.

Everyone needs their own global privacy policy, and this goes beyond Facebook. When you share, do so with the understanding that, even with the best possible settings, any friend can simply copy and paste your status; or save and repost your photo; or simply post a photo or story about something you did. No privacy settings can prevent stupid activity from being seen. It will eventually get out.

That said, I am leaving the door open slightly for the possibility that Facebook has given others far more access to my private life than I know. If this is the case, show me. Show me the application that could potentially harm me.

The Policies
While I enjoy using Facebook and am not in the “delete my profile” community, I admit that I’m not all that comfortable with the entire path that Facebook has taken. I enjoy the new features and am fine with the current privacy settings. However, I do think that they need to be better at communicating changes. They need to be better at communicating, from page to page, what is viewable and what isn’t. Go above and beyond to explain the user’s privacy. Smack them in the face with what audience they are sharing. While I do think Facebook has done a better job at communicating changes than they are given credit, they need to do more.

And I also agree that opt-ins instead of opt-outs are the best policy, particularly with a potentially controversial change. If you are so sure someone is going to want something, first make the compelling argument. Encourage them to check it. Show them what they’re missing if they don’t.

Even so, I firmly believe that putting too much focus on Facebook takes away the important focus on the user’s responsibility to do everything they can to protect themselves. As mentioned before, users needed to agree to each change. We need to be vigilant and understand the ramifications. And if you are too lazy to do the research to understand it, at the very least you need to be more careful about what you post.

How Facebook Can Get Out of this Mess
Just as I am not completely in Facebook’s corner on some of their policies, I also see ways for them to get out of this PR firestorm. While I don’t have much sympathy for the ignorant user, Facebook is still responsible for communicating that these are positive changes.

If I were Facebook, I’d do the following:

• Put a My Privacy: Who Sees This? link on Community Page by “Related Posts by Friends”


• Put a My Privacy: Who Sees This? link within social plug-ins, where feasible


• Put a My Privacy: Who Sees This? link on “trusted third party” sites that implement instant personalization


• Provide video and commentary explaining some of the changes, answering the criticisms, showing the user why the changes are good for them, and acknowledging that those changes are not for everyone, providing an easy explanation of how to protect themselves


• Provide regular webinars or tours on features and use of lists to everyone, not just those with the proper page connections


• Make Instant Personalization opt-in

The last item may be the trickiest since users have already technically opted in to instant personalization when they went through their new privacy settings for the first time. But considering this project is technically a pilot, there’s no need to automatically opt everyone in. Do what they did before. Bring up a box explaining what instant personalization is. Provide videos. Explain why it is good for them. Explain potential risks. Shoot down conspiracies. And then force the user to check the box if they want it.

In Conclusion
While I am not surprised by user backlash as a result of the most recent Facebook changes, I did not expect this level of outrage from mainstream media and technically savvy, intelligent people. With that in mind, it is important that we all do the following:

• Research and understand the benefits and risks involved


• Weigh those risks and benefits with the way that each person uses Facebook


• Understand and actively utilize Facebook’s privacy settings


• Establish a global “privacy setting,” understanding that if we are concerned about privacy we should always be careful about what we share

In the end, it’s personal. These changes are likely to affect me differently than they do you. Maybe Facebook is just too much of a hassle for you. Maybe Facebook does not offer enough benefit to you to actively manage a sometimes confusing control panel of privacy settings. Maybe you do have reason to be outraged. But I don’t believe this feeling is universal. We all need to rationally weigh the risks and benefits and decide what is best for us.

Terry Childs is Guilty.

In mid-2008, Terry Childs, the (then) System Administrator for the City of San Francisco, was called into a meeting with the COO (his boss); the CIO of the SF Police Department; a Human Resources representative; and, unbeknownst to Terry, by phone, a few of the engineers he managed. He was ordered to share the system passwords for the network. He made them up. Subsequently challenged with this fact, he refused to reveal the passwords, ending up in a city jail cell.

Close to two years later, Childs has been found guilty of felonious computer tampering and faces up to five years in prison (he’ll likely be let off in two, with his racked time counting toward the total).

Open and shut, right?  The city claims, and the court found it believable, that Childs’ obstinate refusal to provide passwords resulted in over $200,000 lost city revenue.  He lied to his employer.  He held the city ransom.

Childs’ defense has always been that he was protecting the city’s network.  He wasn’t going to share sensitive passwords with people who, in his estimation, wouldn’t respect the sensitivity of those passwords, and would likely share them other employees and contractors.

To my mind, while that’s a valid concern, it doesn’t clear him.  He still works for the person who was asking for the passwords, and he was obligated to provide them.

The real crime here, though, is not that Childs’ hoarded the keys to the system. It’s that the meeting occurred at all, and the reasons that it came to the point of a stand-off are all too criminally common.  Was Childs guilty? Sure! But others shared guilt in bringing it to that point.  Consider:

• The System Administrator reported to the COO.  No CIO? No VPIT? No IT Director?  This means that there was a gap between the absolute tech and the non-technical businessperson, and that’s a critical layer, particularly for an organization as large as the government of a major U.S. city.


• There were no policies governing use of system passwords. The fact that Childs was allowed to be the sole keeper of the entire network was a lapse in operations that never should have been allowed.


• Childs was a city employee for ten years.  If there were concerns about his trustworthiness or reliability, shouldn’t they have been addressed earlier in that decade?

All too often, IT departments are isolated from the organizations they serve.  Part of this is due to the nature of technology work and techies—we speak a language of our own; enjoy working with the tools that many people find obstructive and confusing; and the majority of us are not very good at casual socializing. More of it is due to the fact that most people—including the CEOs and VPs—don’t get technology, and don’t know how to integrate technology tools and purveyors into the organization.

But that lack of comprehension shouldn’t be a license for persecution.  Everyone’s a loser here, most personally Childs, but the city suffered from a situation they created by not investing properly in technology.  And, by investing, I don’t just mean hiring the right amount of staff and equipment—I mean that CEOs, COOs and everyone up the chain has to step out of their comfort zone and either learn more; hire staff and consultants to vet and translate; or, optimally, both.  The CEO doesn’t have to be as knowledgeable as Bill Gates, but they have to have educated oversight on how IT is run that “gets” what IT is about and how the technology practitioners operate.

As much as Terry Childs is guilty of a crime, he’s tenfold a victim of one, and it’s a cautionary tale for any of us who work in environments where management is happy to let us build a big, isolated kingdom.

What drove Terry Childs to commit a felony was a crime unto itself.

Big changes are happening at Facebook, and they mean that what you do and say, on and off of Facebook, is now being more heavily tracked and more broadly shared. If you think that your Facebook data is somewhat private—e.g., shared only with friends and people you specify—you are wrong.

Facebook announced dramatic changes in their service at their annual “F8” conference on Wednesday. Facebook used to be a network where you could establish semi-private communities with family, friends and like-minded sets of people. Now it’s an internet-wide info-sharing platform that can keep your friends, and the businesses and advertisers that Facebook partners with, fully briefed on all of your internet-based activities and opinions.

The biggest announcement was the introduction of the Open Graph and the new “Like” buttons for the web at large. Yesterday, you could only “like” or “fan” something that appeared on Facebook’s web site. Now you can “like” things anywhere that the social graph and like buttons are implemented. What you “like” will be shared with Facebook, your Facebook friends, and all of the applications you subscribe to on Facebook, and, depending on your Facebook privacy settings, the world at large.

Also this week, and all of a sudden, despite what you might have confirmed a few months ago when Facebook started this paradigm shift, your likes, interests and job history are now Google searchable. That’s right: even if you went in and flagged them as private, your only way to protect this information, as of yesterday, is to remove it (and wait a month for it to fall out of Google’s cache).

Online privacy is a relative concept

Much of the Facebook privacy that we lost wasn’t real privacy to begin with, because any time you add an application (such as a quiz), that application’s developers have complete access to your entire Facebook profile. Worse, anytime a friend invites you to use an application, that application gets access to your profile. You don’t have to lift a finger to have data that you’ve marked as private shared with strangers; you just have to have friends on Facebook who aren’t thinking that, by inviting you to compare movie favs, they’re telling a complete stranger your gender, age, birthdate, job history, sharing all of your photos and publishing your wall to them.

Why “Love it or leave it” is unfair

I have friends who are somewhat blaze about all of this. After all, nobody put a gun to my head and ordered me to join Facebook. I just got so many requests from friends and family that I caved. And, once I caved, I connected to a bunch of “blast from the past” friends, extended family, former co-workers and current associates. So, now have a real investment in Facebook as a social connector. Sure, if I don’t like these changes, I can just delete my account and be done with it. But I’m throwing away far more than just a social network profile—I’m tossing out my connection to my communities of friends, family and professional associates, who are now expecting me to be on Facebook with them.

I could decide that I don’t like the policies of my local utility company, too, and just cancel my service. But the services they provide enable other services that I want/require as well—such as light, heat, computing, communication. Leaving Facebook wouldn’t be as extreme as canceling power services, but, with 40 million users and climbing, Facebook is like a utility in many people’s lives, and it supports services in such a way that relationships beyond our relationship with the service provider are centered there.

Change Management

This is what is so dishonest about CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s repeated assertion that Facebook is only following the direction of the Internet as an open sharing platform. He is right abut the trend. But this is the equivalent of saying that the trend is now for baggy pants and see-through tops, so all of your clothing has been swapped out in accordance with the trend. The internet is all things to all people, and there are plenty of places on it where privacy and closed community are the norm. Just because the internet is becoming more open, it doesn’t mean that Internet users need to be dragged into this new era.

It all boils into “Opt Out” vs. “Opt In”, and respecting rather than walking all over your customers. Facebook began with an assumption of privacy; changes in that assumption should be acknowledged by each user before they are enacted. Facebook could have easily developed their platform in ways that give users the choice of having open or private profiles. Instead, they’ve simply switched our private data to public without asking if that compromises our security, reputation or preferences. And it doesn’t escape my notice that there’s great money to be made in having more personal info about what I like and who I share that information with.

What you should do if this concerns you

If you went in and verified/altered your Facebook privacy settings a month or two ago, you should make another visit ASAP. Facebook has turned it around. Beth Kanter has a good write-up on what has changed. If you have any custom Facebook Pages, look out there as well—even if you’ve set profile data to private, if you link to any of your profile info from a Facebook page, it will default back to public. Whatever you do with your privacy settings, most of your basic profile data is now public and there is no option to make it private. So review your employment history, “about” and likes sections to make sure that it only has data that you don’t mind sharing with Google searchers and every advertiser on earth.

It all boils down to this

Facebook is now like Twitter and Google, with even less options for privacy than those big public networks offer. This doesn’t have to be a bad thing, it’s just a very different thing, and the crime here is mostly that “F8” and “social graph” are not terms that the vast majority of the 40 million Facebook users are paying any attention to. If you’re reading this, you know better, so you can set your profile up with information that you don’t mind being in the public domain, and you can decide if you’re willing to “like” things on the internet and, thereby, expose yourself and your Facebook community to the demographic analysis and actions that will ensue. I won’t be abandoning Facebook over this, but I’m very restrictive in my use of it, and will continue to approach it with great caution.