February 2008

The upshot of this ReadWriteWeb post, as I take it, is that what you’re posting to Facebook, Myspace, and elsewhere online could be fair game in court.

In a lot of ways, it seems to me like: “duh.”

But on second thought I think there are still a lot of people who aren’t really sure about the various forms of privacy on the internet. I always advise people that what you share online is essentially a matter of public record.

Even e-mail is fairly open. It’s a federal crime to open someone else’s mail. Reading someone else’s inbox? Not so much (as far as I know).

Despite the fact that we often call it a “walled garden,” and you need a username and password to log in, social networks aren’t really private space. They should be treated appropriately. Consider yourself warned

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Anthony LeFauce posted earlier today on AllFacebook about a British Intelligence and Security report that found social networks and internet communications in general are too disparate to allow them to effectively track communications.

I think that this is actually a different security issue than the one that’s been hopping around the blogosphere recently. It’s not just “scapegoating,” as Anthony suspects.

The issues facing the security sector reflect a more fundamental shift in our communication technologies, which has been years in the making. Most of what security agencies are concerned with is live tracking. They want to know what a terrorist cell is doing next week so they can take preventative action.

Security in terms of the user, which is what we’ve been talking about in the blogosphere so far, is about databases. It’s not time-sensitive information, it’s identity-sensitive information.

Facebook and other IP-based communications systems, with 500 nodes that can really only give you so much information about who’s sending what, is a nightmare for anyone who is trying to keep tabs on a person’s communications and activities as they’re occurring.

But it’s a gold mine for anyone who simply wants to collect a person’s communications after-the-fact. There are dupicate, triplicate, bazillionate copies of the data on servers all over the place. It’s not like a phone call - you make it once, and if nobody records it, that chance is gone forever.

So to sum it up, we’re looking at a communication system that is scattered, hard to track, but easy to archive. Sucks for governmental security, and sucks for transience.

I don’t think anyone is scapegoating, it’s just a system that naturally tends to be secure in the wrong ways.

According to Valleywag (I know, I know) and Kara Swisher today, Zuckerberg surprisingly announced some statistics for Facebook’s 2008 plans. From AllThingsD:

Revenue for Facebook for 2007 will be $150 million, as has been widely reported. But for 2008, Zuckerberg projected revenue to be increased to $300 million to $350 million.

More interesting was the news that Facebook would spend $200 million next year on capital expenditures, which is a whole lot of servers.

By the way, more expenses, noted chatty Mark, those employee levels would rise to more than 1,000 in 2008 from 450 now.

Zuckerberg also announced the company’s EBITDA as $50 million, which means that a $200 million expenditure puts them down $150.

Valleywag chastises Facebook for running in the red this year. Swisher didn’t say as much but you can read the disapproval between the lines.

But it sounds to me like a good investment. One of the more common complaints about Facebook for a while has been the slowness of the servers. If Facebook ran like Google in your browser, I think you’d notice a difference.