The portability of a friend is the must-have Facebook regulation – TechCrunch

Choice for consumers requires companies to treat fairly. When people can easily move to a competitor, it creates a natural market dynamic that forces a company to act properly. When we can not, other rules leave us stuck with a pig in a new layer of lipstick.

That's why, as a FTC consider how many billions of fine Facebook Which leaders must assume their personal responsibility or dissolve the company? I implore him to think about how Facebook escapes the violation of users' privacy: there is no easy way to switch to an alternative.

If Facebook users are tired of surveillance, security breaches, false news or hatred, there is no Western social network with a general purpose that is large enough to reach them. Twitter is for short public content, Snapchat is for ephemeral communication. Tumblr is neglected. Google+ is dead. Instagram belongs to Facebook. And the others are Chinese, single or tiny.

No, I do not expect the FTC to launch its own Fedbook social network. But what she can do is open a loophole to Facebook so that worthwhile solutions become viable options. That's why the FTC must force Facebook to offer truly interoperable data portability for the social graph.

In other words, the government should adopt regulations requiring Facebook to allow you to export your friend list to other social networks in a manner that is respectful of privacy. This would allow you to connect or follow these people elsewhere so you can leave Facebook without losing contact with your friends. The increased threat posed by those who abandon Facebook to their competitors would create a much stronger incentive to protect users and society.

The list of potential regulations for Facebook currently being discussed by FTC executives includes a fine of $ 3 billion to $ 5 billion or more, holding the Facebook CEO personally responsible for violations of a FTC consent decree, creating new privacy and compliance positions, including Zuckerberg could create an independent oversight committee to review privacy and product-related decisions, according to the New York Times and Washington Post. More extreme measures, such as limiting the collection and use of data by Facebook for targeting ads, blocking future acquisitions or the dissolution of the company are still possible, but apparently less likely.

Breaking Facebook is a tantalizing punishment for corporate wrongdoing. Nevertheless, I somewhat agree with Zuckerberg's response to the call of co-founder Chris Hughes to split the company, which, he said, "will do nothing to help" solve the problems directly. confidentiality or misinformation of Facebook. Given that Facebook would probably not try to make more acquisitions of large social networks, it would be better to voluntarily commit not to try these purchases for at least three to five years. Otherwise, regulators could impose this ban, which could be more politically feasible with less disordered effects downstream,

Yet without this data portability regulation, Facebook can pay a fine and return to its usual activities. It can accept additional privacy monitoring without fundamentally altering its product. It can be held responsible to respect the letter of the law while violating the spirit. And even if it was broken, users still could not switch from Facebook to Instagram, or Instagram and WhatsApp to a new location.

Facebook kills competition with user lockdown

In the face of competition in the past, Facebook has imposed itself to improve. Fearing for Google+ in 2011, Zuckerberg promised "Carthage must be destroyed" and the company is struggling to launch Messenger, Timeline profile, graph search, photo enhancements, and more. After becoming aware of the importance of mobile in 2012, Facebook has redesigned its application, reorganized its teams and asked employees to bring an Android phone for dogfooding tests. And when Snapchat was still becoming a rival, Facebook cloned its stories and now adopts the ephemeral philosophy.

Whenever Facebook felt threatened, it was urged to improve its product for consumers. But after defeating its competitors, curbing their growth or confining them to a niche goal, Facebook's privacy policy has deteriorated. Dina Srinivasan, an anti-trust specialist, explains in her summary of her article titled "The antitrust case against Facebook":

"When dozens of companies competed to gain market share and all competing products were sold at a price of zero, privacy protection quickly became a key differentiator. When Facebook came on the market, it specifically promised users: "We do not use cookies to collect confidential information about users." The competition has not only limited Facebook's ability to track users. This has prevented all social networks from trying to engage in this behavior. . . the exit from the competition resulted in a change of behavior of the only surviving company. In early 2014, dozens of rivals who initially competed with Facebook had actually left the market. In June 2014, his rival Google announced that he would close his competitive social network, thereby giving up the social media market to Facebook.

For Facebook, the network effects of over a billion users on a closed communications protocol have further strengthened the market in its favor. These circumstances – the coming out of competition and the blocking of consumers – finally allowed Facebook to convince consumers to accept something they had resisted from the beginning. Almost simultaneously with the withdrawal of Google, Facebook announced (also in June 2014) that it would begin to monitor the behavior of users on websites and applications on the Internet and use the data collected through this monitoring to target and influence consumers. Shortly after, he also started tracking non-users. It uses the "I like" buttons and other software licenses to do it. "

That's why the FTC must look for a regulation that not only punishes Facebook for wrongdoing, but also allows consumers to do the same. Users can leave holes in Facebook by leaving them, thus depriving them of advertising revenue and reducing their network effect for others. By giving them the opportunity to bring with them their list of friends, users have a bigger seat at the table. I ask what Luigi Zingales and Guy Rolnik, professors at the University of Chicago, have called the Social Data Transfer Act.

Fortunately, Facebook already has a framework for this data portability via a feature called Find friends. You connect your Facebook account to another application and you can search your Facebook friends already present on this application.

But the problem is that in the past Facebook has regularly prevented its competitors from using Find Friends. This includes the removal of Twitter, Vine, Voxer and MessageMe, while Phhhoto could not let you find your Instagram friends … six months before Instagram copies Phhhoto's first GIF file and names it Boomerang. Then you need an active Facebook account to search for friends. This negates its usefulness as a way to bring your social chart when you leave Facebook.

The social network offers a way to "Upload your information", which is useful for exporting photos, status updates, messages and other data about you. However, the friend list can only be exported as a list of text names in HTML or JSON format. The names are not linked to their corresponding Facebook profiles or any unique identifier. There is no way to find your friend John Smith among all those who carry this name in another application. And less than 5% of my 2800 connections had used the little-known option to allow friends to export their email address. What about the big "data transfer project" announced by Facebook 10 months ago, in partnership with Google, Twitter and Microsoft, to offer more portability? He has not released anything yet, which raises the question of whether it was a vaporware designed to rule out regulators.

Essentially, this means that Facebook does not provide any portability for your friendships. This is what regulators need to change. There is already a precedent for that. In the 1996 Telecommunications Act, the FCC required telephony operators to allow customers to easily transfer their numbers to another operator rather than being assigned a new number. If you consider a phone number as a means by which friends connect to you, it would be reasonable for regulators to state that the modern equivalent – your friends connections on the social network – must also be portable .

How to unleash our friendships

Facebook should be required to allow you to export a truly interoperable friend list that can be imported into other applications in a secure manner.

To do this, Facebook should allow you to download a version of the list containing the hashed versions of the phone numbers and email addresses that your friends have used to register. You will not be able to read this contact information or import and spam free people. However, Facebook may be required to share teacher materials with developers of other applications to create a feature that securely crosses hash numbers and email addresses with those who have subscribed to their application. This developer would also not be able to read Facebook's contact information or store useful data about people who had not registered for their application. However, if the phone number or email address of a person listed in your exported Facebook friends list matches with one of its users, that person may suggest you to let yourself contact or follow them.

This system would allow you to save your social chart, delete your Facebook account, and then find your friends on other apps without ever compromising the confidentiality of their contact information. Users would no longer be stuck in Facebook and could freely choose to transfer their friendships to the social network that treats them best. And Facebook could not stop its competitors from using it.

If the company wanted to go further, it could offer ways to make News Feed content preferences or Facebook connections Mobile Groups, as by making it easier for members of the opt-in group. -in joining an email mailing list or parallel text message. For researchers, Facebook could offer anonymized ways of exporting and new business activity data for the study.

Portability would align users' goals, Facebook, and regulators much more closely. Facebook would not be simply responsible to the government for technically complying with new fines, surveillance or liability. It should finally compete to provide the best social application instead of relying on its network effect to handcuff users to its service.

This same model of data portability regulation could be extended to any application with over a billion users, or even 100 million users, so that YouTube, Twitter, Snapchat or Reddit can not block users. By applying the rule only to applications with a sufficiently large number of users, the regulation would not prevent new entrants from entering the market and would accidentally create a gap around well-financed historical operators. , such as Facebook, who can offer the task of engineering. The regulation of data portability, combined with a fine, liability, surveillance and a ban on future acquisitions of social networks, could straighten Facebook without breaking it.

Users have a lot of complaints about Facebook that go beyond privacy. But their appeal is always limited because for many functions, there is nowhere to go, and it's too difficult. By correcting the latter, the FTC could boost the rise of alternatives on Facebook so that users, rather than regulators, can play the role of the king of manufacturers.