Oh where, oh where, is my photo lair?
Last week, I went to see Professors Zittain and Lessig in conversation about the Dilemmas of Open Knowledge at the Harvard 375 roadshow in San Francisco. In response to a question about data and consumer privacy, Zittrain added on to the old maxim that if you were getting something for free online, you were paying for it with your data. Now, he said, even if you were paying for a service, a company was likely making money with your data too.
I’ve been thinking about Zittrain’s words all day following the Insta-Facebook announcement. One of the reasons that I like Instagram is that I hate giving my data to Facebook. I recognize the utility of Facebook as my de facto digital address book and as an event notifier, but I feel powerless when it comes to my data on Facebook. Even though I wiped out bands and movies that I like from Facebook years ago (I’m thinking it has been at least 4 years since I “deleted” this info), I still get Facebook ads related to this old data. And I hate that even though I disabled publishing of location and status tags on Facebook, my friends and family report additional data about me to Facebook. Even if it’s “private,” Facebook still knows it. Even if I hit ignore, Facebook still knows it.
Thus, I embrace Facebook alternatives, and I’m saddened when Facebook acquires these alternatives. With Beluga, I was sad because it was highly functional, and Facebook shut it down to force me to use Facebook messaging instead (I resisted). With Friendfeed, I nuked my own account. And now, as the Atlantic has posed, the billion dollar question is, “Will Facebook’s acquisition of Instagram cause an exodus?“
For now, I’m not nuking my Instagram account / app from my phone, because there simply isn’t a good alternative that I can think of off the the top of my head. Harking back to Zittrain’s words at the beginning of this post, one of the very few web services that I pay for is Flickr Pro, but given all of the churn at both Flickr and Yahoo lately, I have no idea what’s going with my data over there. Now, I mainly view Flickr as my backup for old family photos should an earthquake destroy all of our albums.* I swore off Picasa years ago because Google creeps me out as much as Facebook. So, I now feel that when it comes to posting photos online, I’m homeless. The only photo houses available are rigged with CCTV cams inside, so what am I to do?
*My backup method does not feel foolproof to me given Yahoo’s recent woes. I constantly worry about Yahoo sunsetting Flickr.
Hi, I hear you! I stopped using Picasa when they put in their facial recognition software and started leaning very heavily on me to identify everyone in my photos. I continue to use Flickr and find that it is by far the least creepy. The privacy settings are very limited — just “Friends” and/or “Family” — so I miss Picasa’s ability to make an album, give me a link, and let me control exactly who sees it. But whatever, I am now just on Flickr. I like that it’s very stable, it’s been going with almost no changes for what, 95 years or something, and there’s as yet very little “social” component. This, to me, is a very good thing.
Oh and of course, if you really want to do it right, just get your own domain. You can pretty easily set up WordPress, for example, on your own site, to publish photos sent in from whatever medium you like (such as a phone) and then you can control access in whatever way you please, including passwords and such. Most of Web 2.0 is unnecessary if you have any Web 1.0 skills.
Have you tried smugmug? I opened an account years ago and more or less forgot about it, but it’s been going on painlessly with no nonsense. E.g. http://ruchiradatta.blogspot.com/2004/07/portola-park-pics.html I think their business model is from people buying prints.
Oh, and there’s an annual membership fee, but given your concerns I would guess it would be worth it.
What is the drawback to Facebook knowing what bands you like, or pretty much any other information about you?
@setty and @ruchira – I think that my dilemma here is what if I want to be a “little social,” but not too social? The other problem with FB, asides from my privacy concerns, is that I’ve hit the age where a lot of my friends post either baby or materialistic gloating photos. The friends that I chose to follow on Instagram were much narrower, as to filter out this type of boring, annoying stuff from my feed. Flickr and Smugmug are good options for storage, but not so much for the minor sharing that I want to do within a limited network. I feel like Goldilocks; I want the right amount of sharing capability.
@Greg – I think that one of the biggest drawbacks about Facebook knowing this info is that once Facebook knows it, it can’t unknow it. This data lives on the Facebook servers forever, and there’s nothing that you can do about it.
Second, Facebook has an “act first, fix later,” approach to privacy. A few years ago, Facebook wanted to serve ads with your profile picture to friends of stuff you like. Or the way now that Facebook tried to share links you clicked on with your friends automatically. Or the whole Facebook Beacon kerfuffle. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook_Beacon EPIC has an entire page devoted to Facebook’s bad history with user privacy. http://epic.org/privacy/facebook/