(Facebook Is) A Tale of Two Cities
Sean Moore
It was the best of times. It was the worst of times.
“It just follows you around.”
That was the explanation given for Facebook’s new and godawfully-named “Chat heads” messaging feature by a Facebook PR rep in The Verge’s hands-on video, but it could just as easily apply to Facebook’s new mobile strategy as a whole.
Facebook Home, the “don’t-call-it-a-fork-it’s-an-app-dammit” skin over Android represents a bold commitment to mobile by the social network. The interface is playful and well-designed, has some extremely compelling features, and, at least under the carefully curated conditions that the press were allowed to view Home, the whole system looked gorgeous.
But there is a cost to this new hotness, despite the upfront price tag of free. With such tight integration into the operating system, Facebook can now log your location at all times, track all the apps you’re using, and monitor a whole lot more of the social interactions you make that don’t, or rather didn’t until now, include Facebook as the intermediary. Is the convenience of this system really worth such a high cost?
It is announcements like these that really stress that Facebook is a tale told through two separate stories. There’s the public, user-facing image of the company, there to delight us in making connections within our social network; the company that has really begun to flex its design chops to great effect; the company that is committed, sincerely, to bringing people together in new and exciting ways. But there’s also the Facebook that sells all those interactions, those likes, interests, and social history to the highest bidder; the company that plays exceedingly fast and loose with user privacy; the company that is committed, sincerely, to making money by selling people to companies.
Facebook Home surely represents one of the grandest experiments in collecting data about people’s habits and schedules, their interactions, and perhaps even something deeper that represents who they are. That data could surely be put to great use by the people that are generating it, let alone sociologists, ethnographers, or city planners. But instead that data will be used to help companies collect a couple extra dollars in revenue.
Isn’t that a fucking shame?
I’m reminded of the scene in Fahrenheit 451 where Guy Montag is in the subway doing his best to reak a book, while beset on all sides by blaring sounds and flashing lights from the advertisements surrounding him. I wonder if that will soon become our future, beset on all sides from ad copy trying to use the deep knowledge they have of our history, our habits, where we are and what we do, to sell to us at all hours of the day. Could our own devices that we now so heavily rely on become our personalized commercial prisons? With Amazon and now Facebook making the jump to placing ads directly on the lock screen of our devices, it certainly seems plausible. And terrifying.