(…for about an hour and a half…)
The meteoric rise of Facebook continues to astonish me. No doubt it’s in part due to my own demographic positioning; apparently living in London (the largest geographic group on Facebook with around 840,000 members- which is around a tenth of the city’s population) and being in the fastest rising age group (25 and over), it makes sense that I’d naturally be seeing a lot of my friends joining up and talking about it.
Earlier this week, after an apparent security glitch, Facebook closed down for a while (about 90 minutes or so, it seems.)
Now, there’s a number of websites that I’ve visited regularly over the years that I’ve been using the internet, ranging from functional tools like search engines or web-based email, to social sites like chatrooms or discussion forums (the Web 1.0 version of a Facebook group, I suppose), to the newer Web 2.0 sites like Digg and Flickr. I’ve followed the progress and speculation about films, TV programmes, bands and festivals. As a result, there have been a number of times when I’ve gone to a website and been momentarily horrified to find it temporarily closed down.
But I can’t remember a single instance where 90 minutes of a site’s downtime has been as newsworthy as earlier this week, when Facebook closed down for about an hour and a half for “upgrades.” I had pretty much expected to read stories about it on sites technology-oriented sites like Digg.com (which had a couple of stories speculating on the reasons behind the downtime) but I was a bit more suprised to read about it in the Metro this morning. (Not that I normally read the Metro I might add, but I’d just finished the book I was reading at the time…)
The thing that I’ve found particularly odd is that in the pieces I’ve seen, the story seems to be more about raising the security issues that happened than about the time the site was down; some users saw other (random) users inboxes (although not the actual messages, apparently.) Although there is speculation that the issues and downtime were due to the site being hacked, so far there doesn’t seem to be anything to back the theory up.
Meanwhile, Facebook Applications are spreading like wildfire, no doubt due to their viral nature (possibly best illustrated by those that turn users into zombies/ninjas/pirates/werewolves etc., allowing them to improve their zombies/ninjas/pirates/werewolves etc. rank by “infecting” other users.) At the end of July, there were over 2200 Applications— even though the Applications API had only been launched on 25th May.
The way Facebook applications work is that they interact with code on a third party website; so the Application can ask questions, then deal with the information however it likes. For example, a “Zombies” application might ask the question “how many of this users friends also have the Zombie application installed, and how many of them were referred by this user?” From the answer it gets, it can then work out what Zombie rank to give you. Great fun… However, once you’ve approved an application and given it access to your Facebook profile, it could also be asking questions about your personal information on your profile, the groups you’re a member of, events you’re attending, who you’re friends with etc. etc. Basically, opening up the information in your profile to the stranger who created the Application.
As I said in a previous post, trust is a very important factor with a site like Facebook, where lots of personal information is being stored, which could be used for a number of different purposes. It’s slightly strange (although fairly predictable) that an incident like Facebook being unavailable for an hour and a half attract more attention in terms of security and privacy than the information being made available to anyone who feels like making a Facebook Application.
Obviously, most Facebook users aren’t going to care about the mechanics of how third party applications work, any more than most web users care about the W3C’s specifications for HTML4.1. But it seems to me that we’ve become so accustomed to clicking OK to a bunch of legalese in a EULA (End User Licence Agreement) that we don’t really stop to consider what it is that we’re agreeing to. As long as users don’t care about how Facebook’s modified SQL works, what data it has access to, or what the consequences of their data being made available to third parties is, it’s not going to be a newsworthy story about how your personal information might be being exposed to the world— at least, not when it’s far more apparent that not being able to use Facebook for a bit when you’re bored at work= bad, but seeing how many of your friends you can turn into vampires = good…
(As an aside, just to illustrate Facebook’s growth, there are now 77 Dave Gormans, and 450 people who share my name on Facebook, compared to 50 and 352 about 2 months ago.)
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