Learning Good Privacy Rules Requires Experimentation

from the 20-20-hindsight dept

Wed, Dec 12th 2007 2:12pm — Timothy Lee

Ed Felten has an interesting post analyzing the fallout from Facebook's Beacon gaffe. It's now widely agreed that the company screwed up, which raises the question of why it wasn't obvious ahead of time that Beacon would prove unpopular with users. Felten offers a few ideas: delegating privacy to a single isolated department, treating privacy as a legal or PR problem, or underestimating the importance of peoples' emotional reactions. I think there's also something more fundamental going on: often no one really knows what the privacy rules for new technologies will be. We're now doing things with information that were literally impossible a couple of decades ago. Social conventions haven't been keeping up. As a result, no one—even users themselves—knows what will be considered a privacy violation until after it's been tried. Sometimes, as with last year's Facebook news feed announcement or Google's introduction of GMail, an initial negative reaction blows over once users learn more. In other cases opposition snowballs to the point where a company has no choice but to change course. It's often difficult to predict ahead of time which category a given product will fall into. Peoples' initial concerns are often based on very superficial impressions (such as the idea that GMail is "reading your email") that can turn out to be unfounded once users become more familiar with the product. Other features, such as Facebook's news feed, can turn out to be useful enough that users consider it to be worth a bit of foregone privacy. And in some cases, a new feature just turns out to be a plain old bad idea. We won't know until users have a chance to try a feature and provide feedback. Which is why I think it's a mistake to judge a company too harshly for introducing a new product that turns out to be a bad idea from a privacy perspective. We'll only learn good principles for privacy by experimentation, and experimentation inevitably leads to some missteps. As long as a company clearly discloses how user information will be used and is responsive to user concerns, I don't think people should hold the occasional misstep against it.

Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community.

Techdirt is one of the few remaining truly independent media outlets. We do not have a giant corporation behind us, and we rely heavily on our community to support us, in an age when advertisers are increasingly uninterested in sponsoring small, independent sites — especially a site like ours that is unwilling to pull punches in its reporting and analysis.

While other websites have resorted to paywalls, registration requirements, and increasingly annoying/intrusive advertising, we have always kept Techdirt open and available to anyone. But in order to continue doing so, we need your support. We offer a variety of ways for our readers to support us, from direct donations to special subscriptions and cool merchandise — and every little bit helps. Thank you.

–The Techdirt Team

Filed Under: beacon, privacy
Companies: facebook

16 Comments

If you liked this post, you may also be interested in...

Reader Comments

Subscribe: RSS

View by: Time | Thread

Todd Howe, 12 Dec 2007 @ 2:31pm

Experimentation?
More like, learning how far you can push people requires experimentation.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
- Anonymous Coward, 12 Dec 2007 @ 2:51pm
  
  Re: Experimentation?
  More like how can you best explain stuff so people don't actually understand what you are really doing but legally it's OK ......
  [ link to this | view in chronology ]
- Anonymous Coward, 12 Dec 2007 @ 5:18pm
  
  Re: Experimentation?
  More like, learning how far you can push people requires experimentation.
  Exactly. I can't believe that they couldn't see that this was an invasion of privacy. (I could have told them that. Should they hire me as their CEO?) Their miscalculation was just as to how much they could get away with. When greed is driving the desire to push boundaries, experimentation is often required to find out just where that boundary is on any particular day.
  [ link to this | view in chronology ]
sonofdot, 12 Dec 2007 @ 2:50pm

As long as a company clearly discloses how user information will be used and is responsive to user concerns, I don't think people should hold the occasional misstep against it.
That's the problem. Facebook didn't disclose, and wasn't responsive. On the other hand, a blind pig could have seen that tracking people's behavior when they're not logged in would cause a backlash, even amongst those who only marginally value their privacy (i.e., most Facebook users).
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
- Tim Lee, 13 Dec 2007 @ 6:02am
  
  Re:
  If they didn't disclose and weren't responsive, then how did those outraged users find out about it, and what do you call the changes Facebook made in response?
  [ link to this | view in chronology ]
Erik, 12 Dec 2007 @ 3:08pm

Facebook needs money, they figured this was a way to get some, they didn't consider that people would be outraged by the "value added feature". Facebook doesn't care in the least about user privacy which is a main reason why I don't and won't use the site.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Anonymous Coward, 12 Dec 2007 @ 5:27pm

GMail
Sometimes, as with last year's Facebook news feed announcement or Google's introduction of GMail, an initial negative reaction blows over once users learn more.

I still think Google's mail scanning is an invasion of privacy. However, they seem to have managed to PR spin their way with it to the point that it isn't mentioned much anymore. That doesn't mean that somehow everyone is OK with it now.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
- Tim Lee, 13 Dec 2007 @ 6:00am
  
  Re: GMail
  And you don't have to use it. Plenty of other users seem to feel differently.
  [ link to this | view in chronology ]
  - Anonymous Coward, 13 Dec 2007 @ 7:02pm
    
    Re: Re: GMail
    And you don't have to use it.
    
    I didn't say that I did and I find you insinuation that I did to be intellectually dishonest.
    
    Plenty of other users seem to feel differently. How many is "plenty" (what is a weasel word)? And I would like to point out to you that just because someone uses GMail doesn't mean that they don't feel their privacy is nonetheless compromised.
    [ link to this | view in chronology ]
Alfed E. Neuman, 12 Dec 2007 @ 5:54pm

emotional reaction?
"underestimating the importance of peoples' emotional reactions"

More like commonsense reaction.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Cynic, 12 Dec 2007 @ 6:02pm

I guess it's analogous to "learning whether readers of TechDirt will swallow a very thin line of reasoning about privacy policies can only be discovered by publishing the article". As I read the responses above mine, there seems to be general agreement that it's not that hard a thing to figure out...research, risk analysis plus transparency I think would catch the lion's share.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Anonymous Coward, 12 Dec 2007 @ 7:23pm

Now if somebody would check out the cozy relationship that DoubleClick has with Paypal - What do you suppose happens when Google owns DoubleClick. All bets are off with the Justice Department.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Milan, 12 Dec 2007 @ 7:58pm

While there could be truth to the general argument, one thing that stood out is that both of the success stories - GMail and the activity feed - were providing some direct benefit to the user - high-quality mail service and targeted ads being it in the former case. Beacon seemed to be about, well, sacrificing user privacy for Facebook revenue. Perhaps that's what made this unacceptable?
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
- Anonymous Coward, 13 Dec 2007 @ 5:41am
  
  Re:
  ...direct benefit to the user - high-quality mail service and targeted ads being it in the former case.
  
  Oh yeah, ads are a real "benefit" to me. Hey, where can I go sign up for some spam? I love all those free "benefits" that com flooding into my mailbox.
  [ link to this | view in chronology ]
Anonymous Coward, 12 Dec 2007 @ 11:46pm

There's never a problem if the companies that do this simply make every program "Opt-in". Is this so hard to understand?

The problem here is that, as usual, it was "Opt-out". Compounding the problem was that they made it VERY DIFFICULT to opt out (very short screen time) and you had to do it EVERY TIME.

Idiots.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Ferin, 13 Dec 2007 @ 5:00am

But one would think they could have asked a small subset of users: "Hey we were thinking about this new feature, what do ya think?"
[ link to this | view in chronology ]