Two consumer groups urge Facebook to back off privacy changes
Consumer groups are protesting Facebook's proposal to end its practice of letting users vote on changes to its privacy policies and wants to share more of their data with its affiliates such as Instagram. (Joerg Koch / Associated Press / November 26, 2012)
Context & Ripple Effects
This fight is the latest round in a decade-long pattern: Facebook's 2007 retreat over Beacon showed that coordinated user and advocate pressure could force the company to reverse a data-sharing plan, and its tracking practices drew scrutiny a year ago. In March 2012 the company tweaked its privacy policies over user objections, and the new proposal goes further — ending the user-vote mechanism entirely while extending data sharing to affiliates such as Instagram.
The breadth of pickup matters here: within a day the story ran at CNET, TechCrunch, Ars Technica, Reuters, Computerworld and others, with EPIC among the outlets amplifying it — the same advocacy ecosystem that helped sink Beacon is already mobilized.
First-order effects
- If the proposal takes effect, Facebook's roughly one billion users lose their only formal channel for blocking site-governance changes, and data they post becomes shareable with corporate affiliates including Instagram without a per-change vote.
- The two consumer groups pressing Facebook gain a concrete grievance to take to regulators, reviving the scrutiny that followed the company's earlier policy changes.
Second-order effects
- Instagram, acquired months earlier, sits directly in the blast radius: any perception that its user photos feed Facebook's affiliate-sharing apparatus threatens the standalone goodwill the photo service still trades on.
- Rival networks can position themselves against the vote's elimination, turning 'we won't change your terms unilaterally' into a competitive differentiator just as Facebook monetizes products like its expanded Gifts program.
Third-order effects
- The episode tests whether platform self-governance mechanisms — user votes on terms of service — survive contact with scale, or whether data-sharing disputes migrate permanently to regulators such as the FTC, which the company's prior privacy controversies have already put on alert.
- If Facebook holds the line where it retreated over Beacon in 2007, the lesson for the industry is that post-IPO financial pressure outweighs participatory governance — a template other large platforms would be tempted to follow.
The trend: Platform privacy governance is shifting from user-participation mechanisms toward unilateral corporate control, with consumer groups and regulators as the remaining counterweight.