Facebook Home isn't where your privacy is

Facebook Home isn't where your privacy is

When Mark Zuckerberg and friends debuted Facebook Home yesterday, they downplayed the ever-growing importance your data has for the company. While the Facebook-obsessed may love Home, chances are your privacy won't feel welcome at all.

Facebook has earned a reputation for developing new products and features that are respectful of user privacy, and then slowly, sometimes with great subtlety and sometimes with mastodon-like lumbering, walking those policies back to a decidedly less-respectful state.

There's little indication that Facebook Home will be any different. At the Facebook Home question-and-answer session that followed Thursday's announcement, Zuckerberg said, "Analytics are made anonymous and used for half a percent of the user base." He added that that's the same as Google and Apple, which sounds reasonable, right?

The catch is that the more you share on Facebook, the more Facebook learns about you, and Facebook Home is designed to make you want to share even more.

Privacy and security researcher Ashkan Soltani agrees, and he explained that Facebook Home bridges the gap between passive data collection and active data-creating activities -- such as when you "Like" something in Facebook. "It's in the middle of every interaction on your device," he said.

"The number of times that you interact with Facebook or a Facebook-related service goes up. The number of times that you voluntarily interact goes up. I don't believe they'll be logging who everybody is, but they will be logging the voluntary interaction, checking in, liking posts," Soltani said.

He compared it to a "pornado," the whirlwind of illicit pop-up ads that would follow your mouse and plague Web sites before pop-up blockers were implemented. "Facebook Home will do that, where you'll always be on Facebook," he said.

For its part, Facebook says there's not much daylight between using Facebook Home and using Facebook.com or your Facebook mobile app. Facebook Home is covered under the same data use policy as the rest of Facebook, and the company said in a blog post addressing data use and privacy concerns in Facebook Home that there's nothing unusual or new about which data it collects.

Like other parts of Facebook, Home collects information when you interact with the service, such as liking or commenting on a post or sending a message. Home also may collect other information about how you use it. For example, Facebook maintains a list of the apps that you have in the Home app launcher. We store this information in identifiable form for 90 days and use it to provide the service and improve how it works.

For devices that come with Home pre-installed, Home can display system notifications, meaning that it will show notifications from apps on your phone. Since these notifications appear in Home, Facebook collects information about the notification (such as which app is generating them) but not the content of the notification itself. We remove identifying information from this data after 90 days.

Once it launches next week, it'll be easy, initially, to not use Facebook Home. I expect that to change, even though the launcher and chat interface are initially limited to HTC First phones and people who download Facebook Home from Google Play and live in the U.S. The purpose of Home is to expand Facebook on Android to become a permanent, pervasive layer between you and your apps. Why would Facebook not want to push that?

Sarah Downey, a privacy expert at Abine, a startup that makes privacy-protective browser add-ons and offers privacy-protective services, said Zuckerberg's assurances are not good enough.

"If the past is any indication, Facebook will expand their data sharing as time goes on and as the hype and scrutiny around the launch fades. They're deliberately underplaying the role data plays here, and there's a monetary incentive for Facebook to be with you everywhere you go," she cautioned.