P2P Foundation

Michael Zimmer explains the logic of corporate control of social networks through three laws:

The three Laws of Social Networking are:

1. Promoting the open flow of personal information allows maximum profitability
2. Allowing user control over their information flows is counter to profit maximization
3. Provide some privacy controls, but make it hard

He explains them here in detail. Here are just excerpts:

1.

“Social networking sites are incentivized to promote the open and unfettered flow of mountains of personal information.

Social networks’ ability to make money through contextual and/or behavioral-targeted advertising is dependent on users sharing information about themselves, their lives, and their interests. Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg confirms this point when he notes that “as long as the stream of information is constantly increasing, and as long as we’re doing our job… of pushing that forward, I think that’s….the best strategy for [Facebook]“. In short, the best strategy for social networks is to increase personal information flows online, or, again in Zuckerberg’s words, to get “people through this really big hurdle of getting people to want to put up their full name, a real picture, mobile phone number…and connections to real people” online.

2.

“Consequently, creating and promoting robust, easy-to-use privacy settings to allow users to control and possibly restrict the information they share would generally be counter to a social networking service’s strategic interest. This is my Second Law of Social Networking.”

3.

“Social networking sites might build robust privacy settings to appease privacy advocates, but they don’t promote them and/or make them difficult to use so the majority of users don’t bother to change their default settings, thereby keeping the open flows of personal information undisturbed.

This is my Third Law of Social Networking: Provide privacy, but make it hard. Social networking providers will never admit to this, but the evidence is there: default settings are generally set to share all of your information with all of your friends; there are few (if any) help pages to assist users in managing their privacy (compare to what Google has been doing to try to educate users); maintain the philosophy that, no matter what, information wants to be shared among everyone; and build systems that share everything, and only make privacy changes when the pressure mounts (i.e., News Feed, Beacon, etc).”