Privacy CSR: Facebook Fails Users Once Again

Facebook is constantly pushing the envelope regarding compromising its customers civil liberties. Their typical strategy is try out a new policy, see what kind of reaction it gets, retract it if it's extremely negative. However, it would be great to see more discretion from this company in the first place; Facebook should stop designing products that compromise its users' privacy rights as a means of pleasing advertisers. In so doing, Facebook loses its cool, young company branding, trading it for irresponsible, reckless and malicious.

The issue now of course is Facebook "community pages", which clearly serve to compete with Wikipedia for top spots on Google. Before now, pages were private; created and maintained by specific users for various organizations, causes, people, etc. People could become "fans" of the page. User-controlled community pages were valuable for organizations and companies to delivering information, running campaigns, etc. Now, private pages still exist, but alongside "community pages", which Facebook took it upon itself to create for various organizations, companies and agencies.

Community pages' content is aggregate only, so far; the community page gathers all the content on Facebook related to the subject of the community page. So, it means that Facebook searches users' individual data, harvests it, and copies it to the community page, without permission. The other portion of the community page is wikipedia data.

What's worse, what I discovered by manually opting out of this scam, and what reallllly kills me, is that Facebook strips users' content from their Facebook pages unless users allow Facebook to use it for these community pages. For example, I had a complete and wordy profile prior to this new policy. After I manually opted out of linking all my data to its related community page, such as my hometown, every musical artist, etc, those things disappeared from my profile. My profile is now bare bones even to friends I allow to view it, all because of my choice to protect my privacy. Thus, Facebook holds content hostage for access to it.

The good news is that while Facebook screws its users here, it may also open itself up to a new and exciting world of legal pain. The community pages are created by Facebook without the permission of the parties that are the subject of them, and do not allow those parties to remove them or even affect their content. It's frankly unclear, but this smacks of identity misappropriation, misrepresentation, possibly defamation. I ardently hope some lawyers out there get creative and take Facebook to town.

I cannot think of many companies worse on privacy than Facebook. Without an actual business plan, Facebook has decided to mine its users' data for value. Facebook should just charge a fee to users and stop selling its soul to advertisers. What's worst is that Facebook is deceptive about privacy; the user agreement changes frequently; it's not transparent about what it does with your data. Facebook constantly test the limits of how much civil liberties they can destroy. Just as whether companies exploit children for sales should be evaluated in a company's CSR scores, whether a company exploits civil liberties is another important tenant of corporate social responsibility.  Facebook fails there. That's Mos Def's Community page in the picture.