Just as "there are researchers like myself who think that there's a lot of very valuable information on Facebook and are trying to think of innovative ways of using this information without violating anybody's expectations," he says, Facebook is "trying to figure out a way to maximize an asset they've developed to an astonishing degree. They do need to make money somehow, and that largely seems to involve leveraging their users and their users' information."
As with the Beacon imbroglio, users' reaction to the Terms of Use change was immediate and vociferous. The good thing, says Kaufman, is that the company has responded.
"They're on the front tier. They're pushing the edge of this. Google gets a lot of the same backlash on innovative things they're trying to do, and in both cases I think the degree to which there's a deliberative process going back and forth between users and executives and lawyers has been pretty impressive. It's hard to think of fast examples where consumers have had such a direct and nearly instantaneous impact on corporate behavior."
"I have to tell you, personally, I'm awfully impressed," he says of the quickness with which users fanned the flames of this story, and with which Facebook backed down. "One has to wonder if corporations will become less sensitive over time as it becomes more pervasive, but I'm pretty astonished at the democracy of this process."
Facebook still plans to change their Terms of Use, they're just not sure how. The good news is that when they do, many, many pairs of eyes will be reading the fine print and ready to hold them accountable if they don't like what they see.
"They've retracted for now. But they've also made it clear that they want to forge some kind of new agreement about what data they hold and for how long. We'll have to see how on top of it users are. But there's so much transparency that it's hard to believe they'll get away with a lot."
