Facebook gains half a billion users, but at what personal cost?
So why on earth am I writing to you from Bristol to cover tonight’s news that Facebook now has 500 m active users? Bristol has the highest levels of broadband take-up in the UK and consequently it has among the highest penetrations of Facebook in the world- having a large student population doesn’t hurt either.
We wanted to explore how Facebook has changed Bristol in the hope that it might be representative of the UK as a whole. We’ve met a Facebooking family, a business and a police force that take advantage of the huge levels of highly personalised data that the website accumulates as well as an academic concerned about the readiness of people to surrender their data to Facebook.
To me there is no doubt that Facebook has changed Britain, in some ways I can’t imagine life without it. I don’t know all of my friend’s email addresses or often have their phone number on me. Most weekends I’ve organised what I’m up to thanks to Facebook, if it wasn’t for the website I’d probably not know who’s having a party or be able to congratulate a friend on their engagement. It’s intrinsic to my life in a way I didn’t expect when I signed up to it nearly four years ago.
I first encountered it through my sister who was studying at LSE (London School of Economics), the first British university to be hooked up to the site. This was in the days when Facebook restricted access to specific universities and certainly not the general public. She is good friends with one of Mark Zuckerberg, the Facebook founder’s old college roommates.
When I got my invite in, I expected to just use it to research a story, but I quickly got hooked, so much so that I consider that you must be a user to be a member of 21st century Britain.
This presents a problem. If you must be a user to truly exist (as Sam the 15-year-old I met in Bristol) then can you really, truly agree to the terms and conditions that you have to agree to join the site? If you have no choice, are they fair? Are the ways that they deal with your personal data fair? Should you have more control?
Facebook in my view will in the future be one of the most powerful companies in the world, not just the web. It is ingraining itself into every aspect of our lives; it catalogues our history in a way that Google could only ever dream of. But as it becomes all the more powerful, it has to question how to limit its powers.
Perhaps it should turn itself into a democracy? Perhaps users should truly have control over the way it develops, how it seeks to monetise our data. It already reportedly makes more than $1bn a year from us but in the future it will make many billions. A professor at LSE, Ian Angell said to me when Facebook first went live in the UK that companies like it “are farming our personal data,” in a sense he is right.
Some might say that you can always leave and join another network. True, but will your friends be joining the same one too? And their friends? And your friend’s friends? I doubt it. There were plenty of social networks before Facebook that Mark Zuckerberg copied in a sense, but he timed it just right. He launched a network first through students and then widened it out to everyone, just as everyone got broadband and mobile phones with internet access. He rode a wave and I think, like it or hate it, Facebook will rule for just about ever.
There are 3 comments on this post
Do we have a choice as to whether we join facebook or not? Well, obviously you have a choice as to whether you own a computer or not in the same way you have a choice as to whether you own a television or not. You don’t have to own one but you are at a severe disadvantage if you don’t. Not being on facebook would be like having a television and not watching the BBC. Or channel 4. Facebook is not my social network of choice but I find that I have to be on it because so many other people and organisations are. It has become the IBM of the social networks. As has twitter and that’s their true strength. Even if you join other networks your soon looking for the apps that will allow you to connect them to facebook and Twitter. I think that’s the niche they have filled. They have become the industry standard for connecting all the other networking sites. Also you cant just browse on them you have to join. So their membership constantly grows.
I’m an IT professional in my mid-20s… you’d think that I might be a prime candidate, but I don’t have a Facebook account. Nor do most of my friends or most of my colleagues.
Maybe I am living in a bubble of oddballs who don’t use it but so far not having a Facebook account has done no harm whatsoever to me. Sure, I don’t remember my friend’s e-mail addresses. Thankfully I have an e-mail address book for that. The same runs true for their phone numbers, birthdays… and so on.
I can honestly say that I don’t even have a desire to open a Facebook account. I am not resisting it on the grounds of morality, information security, privacy and so on I am just yet to be convinced that I need a Facebook account. I am yet to find something I can’t do without it.
Anything worthwhile at least.
Same with Twitter. Or a blog.
You can’t go through a week at school without some girls mentioning Facebook as in someone’s status or photos.