The user as commodity of Facebook

Notas del editor

1. This is my Pecha Kucka about Facebook and how Facebook transformed the users into commodities that can be sold on the market. Facebook is a well-known Web 2.0 platform with more than 500 million active users. If Facebook was a country it would be the third largest country in the world.
2. The business model of Facebook is based on the ideal of online participation in Web 2.0 platforms. User activities are channeled. Being part of the technological infrastructure means creating economic value. Facebook implemented their business model into the software design.
3. Bruno Latour illustrates the possibility how technology can shape our behavior. His example is: A hotel owner remind his customers with a written sign to leave the key at the front desk instead of taking it along on a tour with the possibility to lose the key.
4. The sign is not enough to make the customers behave according to the hotel owner his wishes. The sign is displaced by a large metal weight which is able to achieve the desirable behavior. The customers hand in the key. The social statement of the hotel owner is incorporated into the metal weight.
5. On Facebook, users get regulated by Legal Governance and Software Design. Web 2.0 platforms manifest themselves as public places where everyone can join and participate, there is an easy to use interface what invokes positive connotations about the intensions of the platform owner.
6. In 2007 Tim O’Reilly stated that: “ Web 2.0 is not about front-end technologies. It's precisely about back-end, and it's about meaning and intelligence in the back-end”(O’Reilly, 2007 quoted in Scholz, 2008). There is no transparency what happens at the back-end with the content produced by the users.
7. The users are the most valuable asset of the Web 2.0 platform owners, when they leave there is no more money to make. It’s all about numbers. The governance has to be subtle and sometimes even invisible. That results in a user that participates without having the feeling to be controlled.
8. The contracts where users agree to are binary, it is take it or leave it. There is no possibility to negotiate about the contract. That creates an imbalanced relationship were the platform owner has a lot of power to regulate the behavior of the users. Initially a contract was used to protect the owners against damage claims.
9. The things you give up when you agree the Terms of Service are described in a long, difficult to understand fine print. Because the contract is so unreadable people skip the reading and just click yes, I agree. How controversial a contract even might be.
10. “ you agree to grant us a non transferable option to claim, for now and for ever more, your immortal soul” The company GameStation used the action of not reading the terms by their users as an one april joke. More than 7000 people signed their souls away to GameStation.
11. The cookies that Facebook install on your computer are not only able to recognize you when returning to the site, they are also able to follow your browse behaviour. What happens with all the collected data is not quite clear, likely it will be sold to third parties.
12. Facebook state in their Terms of Service that users are able to negotiate about changes that will be made in the Terms of Service in the future. All the communication have to take place on the Facebook Site Governance page. When 30% of all active users vote the result shall be binding for Facebook.
13. But what does Facebook mean with the 30% of all active users? Do they mean 30% of the people that are fan of the governance page or 30% of all the facebook users. In both cases the 30% rule doesn’t look reasonable. Facebook give the users the feeling that their opinion count.
14. Like I already mentioned there is a lack of transparency what happens at the back-end of Facebook. It is important to ask how Web 2.0 users can make a deliberate choice about their own online presence without being deceived by the corporate companies and who has the duty to inform them.
15. Facebook makes it impossible to migrate your own content to another platform in an easy way. An user can’t download his personal communication or his social network. This is how Facebook creates a vacuum, once inside it’s not easy to take the step to leave.
16. Web 2.0 platforms have changed the relationship between the user and the owner. Where users or consumers get the chance to be a producer, the producer appropriates a lot of powerful roles. The owner take the role of a legislator, an observer and a judge in the same time.
17. With all this in mind I state that the users of Facebook are the biggest commodity for Facebook that can be sold on the market for a high amount of money. The core of this problem is not the invasion of privacy but the business model were Facebook is build upon.
18. Maybe we have to nuance the individual harm of this business model. I think that most of the marketers are interested in data of the collectivity of users. It’s the numbers that count.
19. According to Terranova Facebook is a proprietary platform, whose owners are effectively sovereigns when it comes to the digital life of hundreds of millions of users. Deborah Halbert even dears calling Facebook a autocracy. Were the platform owner has all the power.
20. And a wise lesson in the end...think twice before clicking yes on any terms of service.