[We talked extensively about Facebook and privacy this week on the show.  Stay tuned for our upcoming episode.]

The uncanny valley is an effect in computer graphics where as depictions of humans become more and more realistic, they become more off-putting.  Yosemite Sam looks nothing like a human and is not nearly as creepy as Tom Hanks in the Polar Express.  As Facebook makes its transition from private college network to open-network a similar uncanny valley of privacy emerges.  We are comfortable sharing privately online via chat and email and many of us are comfortable being totally open online via Twitter, FourSquare and Blippy, but the kind of open, kind of closed nature of Facebook’s network is extremely un-nerving.

Facebook’s F8 developer conference kicked off a little over two weeks ago, wherein Facebook announced a number of major changes and updates to their platform, api and privacy settings. At the time, most of the reactions were somewhat muted. Developers, journalists and users waited to see what the updates would really mean going forward.

The past few weeks however have seen going backlash against the service. Several major vulnerabilities were uncovered, while simultaneously, a growing number of technology personalities and early adapters like Leo Laporte, Peter Rojas and Matt Cullen have deleted or deactivated their accounts from the service.  The EU has written a letter to Facebook, complaining of the change.  Even some of Facebook’s biggest supporters are writing open letter’s to Mark Zuckerberg on how to fix some of the problems.

It is nevertheless somewhat ironic that so many high profile figures are leaving. Leo Laporte is a particularly good example. Leo seems to live most of his life in front of a camera. He streams his location to Twitter via Foursquare, and generally seems unopposed to living his life in public. The same goes for a number of my friends who have left. They are podcasters and Twittering and bloggers, not people who wish to live in a hermitage of offline seclusion.

Part of the reason is that freedom and control and openness are core values of many of the early pioneers in the internet world. It is clear that Facebook shares none of these value. By making their privacy settings extremely difficult to understand, rolling out major updates to the site with disregard for the userbase’s interests or desires, and even by the way they treat some of their biggest partners (like their developing spat with Zynga), they have shown a desire to control and direct just about every facet of how the internet works. Certainly they are entitled to do what is in the best interest of their business, but they seem to be going in a direction that many people are increasingly uncomfortable with.

I would like to stop here and preemptively respond to some of the common defenses of Facebook and privacy.  First, although it is technically possible for savvy users to maintain a fairly private profile, it is entirely too difficult for the vast majority of Facebook’s users.  Certainly people should be more savvy, but, having worked for 6 years in technical support, I realized that designing a system for what users should do rather than what they actually do is destined to fail.  Secondly, although it is true that everything on the web is potentially leak-able to the general public, there is a big difference between one of my friends sharing that information, and the service provider doing so.  As more and more of our communication and socializing happens online, there is still just as much  as much a need for a place of relative privacy amongst friends as there always has been offline.  Certainly friends can back-stab or leak information about you online as much as offline, but that is a far cry from the service provider forcing that openness.  Thomas Baekdal has a spectacular blog article on this principle, which is well worth a read.

Facebook is marching towards openness, which is unfortunate because we could really all use a place of intimacy on the web.

(Image via Ελεγεία και σάτιρες)

[Updated to add additional relevant links]