Should Regulators Force Facebook To Ship a “Start Over” Button For Users?
I
don’t really understand most of the proposals to “regulate” Facebook.
There are some concrete proposals on the table regarding political ads and updating antitrust for the data age,
but other punditry is largely consumer advocacy kabuki. For example,
blunting the data Facebook can use to target ads or tune newsfeed hurts
the user experience, and there’s really no stable way to draw a line
around what’s appropriate versus not. These experiences are too fluid.
But while I want keep the government out of the product design business,
there’s an alternate path which has merit: establish a baseline for the
control a person has over their data on these systems.
Today
the platforms give their users a single choice: keep your account
active or delete your account. Sure, some expose small amounts of ad
targeting data and let you manipulate that, but on the whole they
provide limited or no control over your ability to “start over.” Want to
delete all your tweets? You have to use a third party app. Want to
delete all your Facebook posts? Good luck with that. Nope, once you’re
in the mousetrap, there’s no way out except account suicide.
BUT
is that really fair? Over multiple years, we all change. Things we said
in 2011 may or may not represent us today. And these services
evolve — did we think we’d be using Facebook as a primary source of news
consumption and private messaging back when you were posting baby
photos? Did you think they’d also own Instagram, WhatsApp, Oculus and so
on when you created accounts on those services? We’re the frogs, slow
boiling in the pot of water.
What
if every major platform was required to have something between Create
Account and Delete Account? One which allows you to keep your user name
but selectively delete the data associated with the account? For
Facebook, you could have a set of individual toggles to Delete All
Friend Connections, Delete All Posts, Delete All Targeting Data. Each of
these could be used individually or together to give you a fresh start.
Maybe you want to preserve your social graph but wipe your feed? Maybe
you want to keep your feed but rebuild your graph.
Or for Twitter: Delete All Likes, Delete All Tweets, Delete All Follows, Delete All Targeting Data.
Or for YouTube: Delete All Uploads, Delete All Subscriptions, Delete All Likes, Delete All Targeting Data.
The
technical requirements to develop these features are only complicated
in the sense of making sure you’re deleting the data everywhere it’s
stored, otherwise every product already support “null” state — it looks
very much like a new account. This leads me to believe that the only
reason these features don’t exist today are (a) it would be bad for
business and (b) actual or perceived lack of consumer demand.
Anecdotally, it feels like (b) is changing — more and more people I know
wipe their tweets, talk about deleting their histories, and so on.
Imagine the ability to stage a “DataBoycott” by clearing your history if
you think Facebook is taking liberties with your privacy and such. This
is what keeps power in check.
