The Unknown Known

People often ask me why I trust Google more than Facebook. After all, both provide services in return for personal information, both are big US companies based on a clever piece of technology, both were started by university students, and both are worth an awful lot of money. Both have privacy issues, most have been identified and many have been fixed. Both are opt-in, you don't have to use them. The reason I trust one more than the other is simple: the unknown known.

Here's a good example. Check out Google's privacy policy. It states happily that when data is 'deleted' from their services, the data may be retained by Google even if not publically available. Facebook contains no such line, so it's implied that deleting something actually deletes it from Facebook's servers. Yet I had a Facebook profile that I deleted about two years ago, and the photos I uploaded to the account before I deleted it were still accessible to anyone with the JPG URL some eighteen months later. In fact, the only reason I can't access them now is because Facebook changed their URL structure a few months back and all old URLs became invalid; I don't for a minute believe that those images aren't still on Facebook's servers. There are good reasons why the images don't disappear immediately - residual data and backups being the main two. But the fact is that Google announces this up front, and Facebook doesn't. And this is the crux of why I don't trust Facebook as far as I can throw it.

Another issue of contention with Facebook is the Friend Finder feature. You enter your Hotmail or GMail username and password and Facebook logs into your account and hoovers up all the email addresses it can find. It specifically states that it doesn't store your password, but it doesn't mention keeping a login session active and it certainly doesn't say what it does with the emails and contacts that it finds. Someone I know, who has never had a Facebook account, recently had an invite email sent via Facebook saying "[x] wants to be your friend". Contained within the email were suggestions for about a dozen other people she knows, some of whom were family members who had no contact whatsoever with the person who sent the invite. The only way this could have happened is that the family members also used the Friend Finder, and Facebook stored all the connections for future use. Basically, Facebook has a sort of dark network underneath its world-facing one to which you have no access and can't opt out of, Facebook account or not. If you have an account you can delete all your Friend Finder history, but this doesn't really help you if you choose not to have a Facebook account, or if someone who has your email address has previously used the Friend Finder.

Back to photos, you may already know that when a digital camera takes a photo it stores lots of information about the camera as hidden data within the JPG file. The time, the date, the camera settings, make and model. Smartphones with GPS often geo-tag images, meaning that the location in which the photo was taken gets stored as well. When you upload images to Facebook, it processes them to optimise them for web use, and this includes removing meta-data - download a photo from Facebook and load it into an EXIF viewer and you'll see it has no meta-data whatsoever. However, recently Facebook have started trying to encourage people to 'check in' to places they've visited and occasionally you'll get one of your photos shown to you with the message "this photo looks like it was taken in [y]". It gets this information from the geo-tag, which it's been storing, inaccessible to you or other Facebook users, since the photo was first uploaded. It's not that Facebook are trying to do something clever with the geo-tag information, it's the fact that they're clearly storing meta-data and not telling anyone that I have a problem with.

There is a movie called The Social Network, which tells the story of the creation of Facebook. The opening scenes show founder Mark Zuckerberg building a collection of photos of every Harvard student without their knowledge or consent, and hosting it on a public server for everyone to see. Zuckerberg's complete contempt for anyone's privacy is illustrated further in an infamous leaked IM conversation between Zuckerberg and an anonymous friend. He offers his friend personal info from Facebook's database. When asked how he got the data, he simply replied "They 'trust' me. Dumb fucks." Zuckerberg is still running Facebook, and probably has complete access to all sorts of information about you, whether you use his website or not. At least the information Google collects is used in their products and services to their users, and not just hoarded away where only the site admins can see it. Google even has a dashboard feature where you can see exactly what information they have on you and with whom they're sharing it, which gives you the opportunity to delete information if you don't want it shared. Facebook has no such feature.

So, to summarise: Google take your information, are completely transparent about what they're collecting and how, and give you something useful back in return. Facebook take your information, often without your knowledge or consent, fuse it with information they've conned out of your friends and family, and then hide it away, sometimes even denying they have it. It's not really surprising that I trust Google more.