Facebook, Privacy, The Problem With Free — And All That Jazz

Facebook has been getting dragged through the mud recently with their consistent loosening of privacy. Some of it’s a bit self serving, for instance Google’s anti-Facebook campaign that included several prominent Googlers closing their accounts and being public about it. However Facebook really does have some problems as you can see from:

• this interactive graph — showing how they’ve expanded their privacy scope over the years)

• this NY Times article — showing the myriad different settings you have to grapple through.

There’s been a lot of online reaction but I haven’t heard on the tension between the privacy/service expectations of a free service. People have become very used to not having to pay for things online, to an extent believing they have the right to get everything online for free and that it’s an outrage to pay for it. This doesn’t take into account the true cost of a free service which be greater than what you’re saving. The Facebook fiascos are a perfect example: since it seems so obvious to users that social networks should be free, Facebook is forced to look for other ways to monetise. Since people on Facebook aren’t receptive to direct commercial messages, other forms of data gathering (as an attempt to monetise your usage) are an unjustified but completely expected result.

One problem with free is that you tend to undervalue how good a lot of the services are since we perceive value based on a lot of factors other than just merit (see for instance this great post on the subjectivity of wine tasting and how the label almost totally dictates the judgements of wine critics). Even more importantly, not paying a website makes a HUGE ideological difference to how they are likely to treat you. The website undervalues you because you are not a customer but a commodity. None of this need be intentional. It’s a perfectly understandable aspect of today’s psychology of money. But it shows that things should be improved.

Here’s an obvious example. I’m currently working on a family history project which involves digitising and preserving thousands of family photos, documents and stories by scanning, manipulating, tagging etc. For something this important I want those photos online as backup, and also for easy searching, tagging and sharing with others. I opened a Flickr account, set all the photostreams to private and started to upload. And then I found that a free account only lets you access your last 200 photos directly (although you can still hack it by accessing each photo at its individual URL). At first I was a bit annoyed since I had no intention of getting a pro account.

And then I realised (5 seconds later) what an idiot I’ve been. A pro account is about $50 for 2 years, the equivalent of three takeaway meals. And yet what am I buying with that? I’m buying the status of a customer. Flickr, having made money off me don’t need to monetise further by selling my data. I don’t have to rely on the goodness of their hearts — I’m not someone they’d want to lose through annoyance. Contacting Facebook or Google as an unpaying customer is like playing the lottery. A paid service has customer service because it has customers.

For something important I realised I should be actively seeking out a good company to try and spend money with them, become a paying customer and receive my entitlements. Perhaps us internet users need to reeducate ourselves a bit more in that sometimes free means costly and we should be actively seeking out someone to pay instead.

It’s unlikely to happen but I’d much rather pay Facebook say $20 a year as opposed to having ads or privacy problems. They certainly provide more than $20 of value. In fact those fake groups that claim Facebook is about to start charging (and get all outraged and boycotty) have it exactly backwards.