Skip to Content
Uncategorized

Facebook Can’t Fix Privacy Problems With Technology

In an FCC hearing, Facebook CTO Bret Taylor defends his company’s privacy practices.

Facebook is often criticized over privacy. Just think of the launch of Beacon.

But listening to CTO Bret Taylor defend the company’s privacy practices yesterday at a hearing before the U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation, it’s hard to fault the company’s technology. Facebook is in many ways at the cutting edge of Internet security and privacy–and it has to be considering the large quantity of personal information that it stores.

Facebook’s privacy woes have not been caused by technical bungling. It’s hard to imagine, for example, the company suffering the sort of ongoing technical humiliation that Sony has recently experienced. Facebook’s record so far has been much better than that. Rather, it’s Facebook’s tendency to suddenly change the rules that have landed it in hot water.

Taylor’s discussion of how Facebook handles user privacy was thoughtful and impressive. “People will stop using Facebook if they lose trust in their services,” he said, a line we also heard from Google in last week’s hearing. He went on to outline the ways that Facebook allows users to control what happens to their data, in particular the fine-grained privacy controls that allow users to select who can see their posts. Users can set different policies for photos, status updates, and other kinds of content, and can even set special privacy policies for specific posts.

“We cannot satisfy people’s privacy expectations by creating a one size fits all approach,” Taylor argued.

Taylor highlighted that the company has worked with partners on new authentication technologies that allow users to share information with third parties safely, and noted, “We are one of the few Internet companies to extend our privacy controls to our mobile interfaces.”

He added that the company also offers different default settings for minors, and is currently testing a new, more transparent privacy policy for all users.

What Taylor didn’t talk about is Facebook’s habit of changing its default privacy settings without giving users much notice. The last time this happened, for example, users logged into Facebook and were confronted with a long description of changes to how their would be shared. Few have the patience to sit down, understand the changes, and fix them.

This is where the company keeps going wrong. And no matter how sophisticated or thoughtful its privacy and security technology, Facebook can’t fix its problems until it gets the human factor right.

Keep Reading

Most Popular

Large language models can do jaw-dropping things. But nobody knows exactly why.

And that's a problem. Figuring it out is one of the biggest scientific puzzles of our time and a crucial step towards controlling more powerful future models.

OpenAI teases an amazing new generative video model called Sora

The firm is sharing Sora with a small group of safety testers but the rest of us will have to wait to learn more.

Google’s Gemini is now in everything. Here’s how you can try it out.

Gmail, Docs, and more will now come with Gemini baked in. But Europeans will have to wait before they can download the app.

This baby with a head camera helped teach an AI how kids learn language

A neural network trained on the experiences of a single young child managed to learn one of the core components of language: how to match words to the objects they represent.

Stay connected

Illustration by Rose Wong

Get the latest updates from
MIT Technology Review

Discover special offers, top stories, upcoming events, and more.

Thank you for submitting your email!

Explore more newsletters

It looks like something went wrong.

We’re having trouble saving your preferences. Try refreshing this page and updating them one more time. If you continue to get this message, reach out to us at customer-service@technologyreview.com with a list of newsletters you’d like to receive.