Mark,
I read your letter to Facebook users on the subject of networks and privacy this morning, and you’re right about a lot of the issues with Facebook as it stands. The current model for information control really doesn’t work, and I agree that it needs to be fixed.
But eliminating regional networks and giving a facelift to the existing privacy controls isn’t the way to go about that. Here’s why:
You write that the somewhat pastoral model of networks worked well when they were comprised of students, but that it failed when regional networks sprang up that contained millions of users under one blanket grouping. This is accurate in the sense that having millions of people in the same network makes it more challenging to control, on a micro level, who has access to your information. In eliminating these broad networks altogether, though, you’re losing sight of two pretty basic points:
(1) People who are members of regional networks want to be found. This represents a different mindset from people who are only in networks for their workplaces or schools. After all, only 50 percent of Facebook users are members of these types of networks to begin with. If you want to network with people around you, rather than just people you already know, you’re necessarily going to be more forthcoming with your information — not just to some of them, but to all of them. The regional network model works well for that.
(2) The fact that certain networks are too big doesn’t represent a problem with the model — it just represents a problem with those networks. The solution, accordingly, isn’t to scrap the model; it’s to fix those networks where it’s failing.
So, let’s take the case of the India network as an example. Certainly, it’s a problem to have a single network for a country of almost 1.2 billion people, of whom about 5 million are Facebook members. But in the case of the United States (a smaller country overall, with 308 million people), the number of resident Facebook members sits at just shy of 101 million. To put it in perspective, the same number of people are Facebook members in the state of Florida as all of those in India put together.
Why is network overcrowding not a problem in the United States, whereas it is in India? Simple: the United States has hundreds of regional networks — on the order of cities, rather than states or an entire country — whereas India has only one.
The fact that Facebook saw fit to subdivide the United States so effectively but neglected to give India even basic separation of provinces or cities is nothing short of racist — or at the very least, maliciously anglocentric. The same is the case in China. If you want to fix the problem of networks with too many people, try making them smaller. India has 35 administrative divisions that, on order of geographic magnitude, are roughly equivalent to American states. Start with those.
It’s not that I disagree with the idea of improving Facebook’s privacy controls; in their current state, they’re borderline unusable. I just think that users should retain the ability to associate with people in their geographic vicinity, if they so choose. Opting out of regional networks, as I’ve done, is a way to protect my information from people I don’t know and, more likely than not, don’t care to know. But denying me that choice doesn’t make keeping my private information private any easier; it just makes it harder to share it when I actually want to.