People are getting more active and more engaged as they get the info tools and skills to let them. At the moment, they are still a minority though. Would the mainstream who aren’t activist personalities be so interested? Can’t see many of my own friends from outside of activist circles either realising or worrying so much.

And I strongly disagree that the non-geek majority doesn’t really care about trust. If you look at who’s involved in the large protests (Beacon, or the current kerfuffle over applications), it’s mostly real people. The activists I was talking to who were getting warnings (and saying things like “f—ing FB”) were a diverse group in pretty much every dimension, including profession. On the other hand, geeks are often willing to put up with privacy invasions for cool new functionality — and Facebook goes out of their way to treat geeks well to keep ‘em from making trouble.

The Scoble affair really highlights this. While working for a Facebook competitor, Scoble violated Facebook’s terms of use, their privacy policy and the trust of 5000 of his friends by copying personal information. Facebook’s deactivated his account, and then quickly restored it after he blogged about it and started to get some publicity — in other words, no punishment for Scoble for his violation of trust. The techie response here has been to focus on the underlying technology issues via dataportability.org . On the other hand, when I talk to friends, acquaintances, and relatives who aren’t geeky the response is pretty consistent: why did Scoble think that was okay — and why didn’t Facebook do more to protect their users?

jon

I think there’s a danger for them in getting complacent on Trust. They’ve made the leap to mainstream, and so they’re not so reliant on keeping the early adopters (who are more privacy aware) happy as much as other social networks are. They could afford just to let the geeks leave and fall back on the non-geek majority who don’t really care about trust.

I think that’d be a mistake though, as if their venture capitalists care whether the company is still in business in 2 years, they’ll need to keep innovating and pushing, and they’ll need the geeks as guinea pigs for that.

I’ve also met Facebook’s Chief Privacy Officer — I sat next to him on a plane when we were both flying to the Computers, Freedom, and Privacy conference a couple of years ago — and also think he’s a good guy, very intelligent and strategic, and very much wants the right thing to happen. They’ve gone a long way to make Facebook a better climate for activists, introducing things like Causes (which are incredibly powerful). And from their perspective, all of their support for activism isn’t bringing in any advertising money; so it’s not unreasonable for them to prioritize their business.

The risk from their perspective is that too many people are going to start falling between the cracks and getting deactivated. Once that’s happened enough, especially considering their other trust issues, people will start moving elsewhere.

On the other hand, if you look at it differently, there are so many good communications mechanisms on Facebook that once you know where the restrictions are, you can route around them; so if they’d just stop with the ’summary judgement’ stuff, give moderators of large groups some training, and (over time) improve their discussion functionality it could well turn into one of *the* places to be as the US continues its year-long election …

jon