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William Vambenepe posts a challenging thought piece with a very simple contention – Data too sensitive to leak from Facebook is too sensitive to be on Facebook.

Vambenepe gives many examples of ways that Facebook can fail, but sums it up with a simple piece of advice: “Don’t put anything on any social network that you don’t want to be made public.” He goes on to broaden his thesis, looking at the Google Buzz fiasco saying that:

It’s as if your insurance company suddenly decided it wanted to enter the social networking business and announced one day that you were now “friends” with all their customers who share the same medical condition. And will you please log in and update your privacy settings if you have a problem with that, you backward-looking, privacy-hugging, profit-dissipating idiot.

All of which was interesting given the (somewhat in jest) session I lead at the recent Google Bar Camp entitled “Who is more evil, Google, Apple or Microsoft?”. Now given that this was a Google event with a bunch of Apple users present, I was pretty certain that Redmond would come out looking worst in the scrap but in fact this wasn’t the case. At both this session and a similar one I’d run previously along the same lines – people surprised me in their response. Many seemed to have the view that all three are evil, it’s just that with Microsoft and Apple their evilness is overt, whereas with Google it’s a much more understated attribute.

Now I’m not at all a Google hater. I live in Google apps, I’ve got lots of friends who work for the organization and fundamentally I love what they’ve done to the marketplace but despite all that I feel a little… uneasy. The theory goes like this:

Microsoft and Apple make their gazillions  from selling software and/or hardware that, in a lot of examples, is proprietary and that traps its users into a particular way of working. Users, to a greater or lesser extent, accept this vendor lock in because they:

1. Gain a consistent way of working
2. Feel some certainty over the security of their data

Google is different – we all know that Google manages to offer us cheap or free products mainly because they are able to make huge money off of the collective intelligence that they so effectively mine – and this is where our concerns begin. People are (broadly) comfortable with their web searching habits being part of the great Google aggregate, but that becomes more concerning when they’re considering the same with their documents, their photos, their financial data.

So what can we learn from this triumvirate? And how should we relate that to the current furore regarding Facebook and privacy?

As Vambenepe says:

Yes you should have clear privacy settings. But the place to store them is in your brain and the place to enforce them is by controlling what your fingers do before data gets on Facebook. Facebook and similar networks can only leak data that they posses. A lot of that data comes from you directly uploading it. And that’s the point where you have control. After this, you really don’t. Other data comes from tracking and analyzing your activities and connections, without explicit data upload from you. That’s a lot harder for you to control (you rarely get asked for your privacy preferences on this data), but that’s out of scope for this blog entry.

Just like banks that are too big to fail are too big to exist, data that is too sensitive to leak from Facebook is too sensitive to be on Facebook.

And so as many questions are raised as are answered – I’d like to get a feel for how the readership regards the big three – Google, Apple and Microsoft, in terms of privacy and how this relates to an unasahamedly consumer play, Facebook.

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I have been critical of Facebook’s privacy policies in this blog. In my opinion, Facebook has really gone rogue. They give a damn to users just like what Microsoft did during the time it had monopoly like power in the market. Having said that the movement to delete Facebook accounts is at best hysterical. I think we should have a more pragmatic approach than the emotional approach of deleting the Facebook account in protest. At least, from my point of view, I am not going to delete my account even though I am terribly upset about Facebook’s attitude. I have my entire family and most of my friends in there and I cannot afford to delete my Facebook account (at least at this time). I am more inclined to take a pragmatic approach, continue to voice my protest through Facebook and other online forums and take steps to protect my privacy as much as I can.

Now, there is an option. The good folks at ReclaimPrivacy.org has released a bookmarklet that helps you tighten your privacy in Facebook. It is a scanner that scans your Facebook account to inspect your privacy settings and warn you about settings that might be unexpectedly public. All you have to do is to drag the bookmarklet to your browser toolbar, log into your Facebook account and click the bookmarklet you just installed. It scans and tells you if your privacy is good. If not, it gives you an option to fix it with a click. A pretty nifty tool that can help people like me who still want to stay in Facebook but maintain a level of privacy.

I wish these folks had put up a nice “About” section giving background on the effort. It would have given more confidence to non technical users (well, there are more than 450 Million of them in Facebook) who want to use the tool for fixing the Facebook privacy issues. Technical users can see that it is an open source tool with source code available. This is good enough to assure us that we can trust the tool. Anyhow, if you are worried about the privacy of your Facebook account, I strongly urge you to use this tool to fix it. 

Disclaimer: It is a publicly available open source tool which I used to fix the privacy issues in my account. Your mileage may vary and I am not responsible for anything that happens with the use of the tool. As a blogger, I am writing about a tool that could potentially help Millions of Facebook users. Check out the Techmeme discussion about this tool.

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