You Dot Net (you.net) – The Secure  Social Networking Website

MM3B03 Final Essay

Blair Kelly
Student #: 0358715
Professor Sinclair

December, 2009.

Not quite a decade ago, the internet was very much understood to be about people getting connected to websites of special interest, business, or both. These sites had very little in the way of interactivity, and so the web was perceived to be, by and large, a static environment. Then along came Jonathan Abrams. While on a walk through Santa Clara Park with a friend in 2002, an idea formed in his head that would give rise to what we now know to be online social networking websites: these would allow users to create their own profiles (Chafkin 2007). Users could then “link” profiles together, which would result in an expansive social network. His invention would come to be known as Friendster, one of the most spectacular failures of promising tech fads in recent years. But this was far from the end of social networking websites. Other manifestations of Abrams’ idea have exploded in popularity, namely MySpace and Facebook.

A large market exists for social networking sites with superior security to that of existing ones. Here I propose a hypothetical answer to this demand, “You Dot Net” (or “You.NET” or “YDN”). YDN is a social networking site which builds upon the prior success of similar sites, but with a particularly keen eye toward defense of user privacy. YDN would base its registration on some form of hard-to-duplicate identification, and here banking information is suggested. Because of the understandable apprehensiveness some may feel about giving out their banking information, the “pitch,” as it were, to the public would have to be carefully constructed. Users must be ensured that the safety of all of their personal information is top priority, and this must be backed up with extremely secure infrastructure and operating procedures. Due to the nature of YDN’s signup process, I argue that its user base would be very loyal to the YDN community, and we can expect a drop in all forms of nefarious activity.

It can be truly said that an enormous number of people want simple, reliable and secure social networking. Abrams’ invention acted like a gas in a vacuum. He delivered his first prototype of Friendster in March of 2003, and by June it had 835,000 registered users (Chafkin 2007). In 2004, both Facebook and MySpace were introduced. MySpace had roughly 67 million users by mid-2006 (Kawamoto 2006), and between December 2007 and April 2008, MySpace and Facebook shared similar growth and popularity – both receiving between 100 and 150 million unique visitors per month (Arrington “Facebook Now”). But by June of 2008, Facebook was clearly pulling away. By January of 2009, it was nearly twice the size of MySpace, worldwide (Arrington 2009). Today, at 350 million users (Facebook 2009) Facebook is by far the largest people-oriented social networking site.

The disaster that was Friendster of 6 years ago, and the recent decline of MySpace (Goldman 2009) are not indications that social networking is diminishing. Friendster failed for a number of reasons that ranged from its technical difficulties and much more critically its dysfunctional management (Chafkin 2007). The decline of MySpace likely has much to do with its user profiles being overly customizable, providing an inconsistent (or nightmarish) experience to users, and a method of updating profiles which is not as easy as Facebook. Simply speaking, Occam’s razor is the key to many things – including social networking web design.

Further, Facebook and other people-focused social networking sites are by far not the only social websites on the internet. Activity or topic-focused sites are also very popular, such as YouTube and Flickr. In both instances, a vast community of users contributes to the content available for viewing, in this case videos and photos. In both instances, users can comment on, rate, tag and share content and even embed it in their own websites. On YouTube, heated discussions are a frequent occurrence – regarding even the most mundane of videos. At the time of writing, YouTube is the 4th most popular site on the internet (Alexa.com 2009) – only two spots down from Facebook. Flickr is not as popular, but considering the sheer number of sites accessible on the internet, 33rd from the top can hardly be balked at. And, at least in the case of YouTube, the trend is upward: at the beginning of 2009, the video sharing megasite saw 174 million viewers in the US alone (Ghai 2009), which is to say the least an impressive surge from the 58,000 worldwide views clocked in August of 2005 (Sterling 2009).

YDN is not intended to be in direct competition with sites like YouTube. Similar to Facebook, YDN will make the content of specialized social websites embeddable and sharable within its framework. Current person-oriented social networking sites like Facebook are inadequate – and YDN intends to fill the gaps. The Facebook user interface, although more easy and appealing to use than what MySpace has to offer, is not as intuitive or easy to use as it should be. Phil Barrett, on his blog Burning the Bacon described one of the features of the latest site design, saying “By sandwiching social ads with relevant updates from your social graph, [the Facebook team] hoped to increase click-through rates of their ads… still among the poorest performing in the industry. They call this section ‘highlights’.” He goes on to evaluate the effectiveness of this new design feature: “Highlights on their own and in the context of the previous homepage design was a neat idea – but in the context of the current site design, all we get is clutter, a loss of focus and a loss of visual hierarchy” (Barrett 2009).

Clearly, Barrett is not the only one who is unhappy with Facebook’s most recent makeover. Two Facebook groups in particular are worth mentioning: the first is “Bring Back the Old Facebook,” with about 820,000 members. The second is “Change Facebook Back to Normal,” with approximately 1.8 million members. They speak for themselves. A polling application was created which asked users if they liked the new layout. Of nearly 800,000 respondents, 715,000 voted that they did not like it (Arrington “Facebook Poll”). The powers that be at Facebook headquarters in California decided they, for the most part, would ignore these users – and aside from a few features here and there, the site did not revert back to its old style. When one considers that Facebook has over 350 million active users, merely 2 million or so users are a considerable minority. Those who were annoyed with the makeover were probably more likely to actively seek an outlet for their frustrations than those who were content. And further still, there is the chance that many of those who joined these groups in protest were simply annoyed with being unable to find their favourite features right away, and after a time grew to like the new design. Even so, one must pay at least a marginal degree of respect to the complainants– there certainly are going to be people among them those who genuinely dislike the direction Facebook is heading. The important thing to remember here is that there will undoubtedly be at least a modest number who are willing to give a new social networking tool a go.

And what of Facebook’s privacy and security track record? Here things get a bit stickier. There is yet another Facebook group, called “Millions Against Privacy Policies and Layout Redesign.” As of writing, the group has just under two and a half million users. Far more than layout design, users are concerned about their security. And it seems they have good reason to be: take for example Facebook Ads, which, when it was first unveiled, included a system called “Beacon.” Beacon was partnered with approximately 44 external sites that would communicate user’s activities back to Facebook to create extremely focused advertising messages to users (Malik 2009). There was never a clear method established for opting out of the Beacon service, and the way in which Beacon handled users information was “contrary to the stated privacy policies of the Facebook website and every other Facebook Beacon Activated Affiliate that signed up for the program” (Kincaid 2008). Eventually a lawsuit was brought against Facebook over the issue in August of 2008, and culminated in the shutting down of Beacon in September of 2009, and a 9.5 million dollar contribution to the settlement of the lawsuit (Perez 2009).

Facebook also came under fire from the Canadian government, who claimed the social networking service violated Canadian privacy laws. “The Office of the Privacy Commisioner’s report found that Facebook continues to breach PIPEDA (Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act) in four ways,” stated one CBC report.  “Facebook does not have enough safeguards to prevent developers around the world from getting unauthorized access to user’s personal information… [it] keeps information from accounts deactivated by users indefinitely… [it] keeps the profiles of deceased users for ‘memorial purposes’ but does not make this clear…[and it] allows users to provide personal information about non-users without their consent.” (CBCNews “Facebook Breaches”). There can be no doubt that Facebook has greatly underperformed in terms of an issue which its users so evidently care very much about.

And so how will YDN succeed where Facebook has failed? Of course, it will brandish an interface which is simple, intuitive, and in all manners pleasing to the user. Of equal importance, it will be a social networking site with much tighter and clearer security policies. This will include a much stricter registration process, and a vivid declaration: information specific to certain users will never be shared with third parties. The generalized and public information that will be shared with advertisers, such as site traffic statistics, will be made explicit. Once an organization (or anyone or anything) has a bad reputation, it is very hard for that reputation to be changed. Take Friendster, for example. Years on, it is still popularly known in the business world as a spectacular failure, with its founder shouldering most of the blame, and has become the focus of a Harvard Business School case study on how not to manage a business (Chafkin 2009). Facebook holds a similar honour in terms of customer privacy issues. YDN will have a fresh start, and will pride itself in never taking for granted the security of user information.

As stated, YDN will feature a strict registration method. The proposed method will require bank account information about every user, and must be verified before a user’s account can be activated. The method will be similar to that employed by Paypal, except YDN will not harbour any sums of money as Paypal does. All of the user’s banking information is kept strictly confidential, never to be shared with any third party for any reason. The logic behind the banking information requirement is fourfold: 1) Providing information to be checked against the records of a third party institution, in this case the bank, is information that is much harder to forge than simply a first name, a last name and an e-mail; 2) Truer information will lead to less nefarious activity such as information theft and harassment; 3) The network’s community will be particularly loyal; and 4) banking information at-the-ready will facilitate donations and sales of goods related to YDN, be they virtual “gifts” or physical paraphernalia.

How do we know the more sensitive information will lead to less immoral information mining and social harassment? By virtue of the sensitivity of banking information, individuals will inherently be more guarded about their accounts. The site will make every possible stipulation and take every precaution to ensure the user’s privacy to the best of its ability, the rest is up to the user, for which the responsibility to protect oneself is made wholly more apparent. Furthermore, in the case of would-be predators or otherwise ill-meaning individuals, they would now face the much more salient possibility that their activities can and will be traced back to them, and rather swiftly. While it surely could not stop the most determined from doing their deeds, it is true that no system is infallible; nevertheless it would surely reduce unwanted behaviour.

It is for the same reason (increased sensitivity of information) that we know users will be more loyal to YDN. According to Leon Festinger, “when there is an inconsistency between attitudes or behaviours… something must change to eliminate the dissonance. In the case of a discrepancy between attitudes and behaviour, it is most likely that the attitude will change to accommodate the behaviour” (Festinger 1957). In the case of YDN, once a user has made the unusual move of submitting banking information (not to be confused with credit card information), he or she then must consolidate this action with beliefs from that point on. Say, for example the user is tempted to pick up stakes and dedicate the majority of time on another social networking site. And say the user has built a large network of friends on YDN, replete with extensive amounts of uploaded content. In addition to leaving this hard-won (or at least time-costly) state, he or she must also justify leaving with YDN very sensitive information. Information not just handed over for no-good-reason, right? Of course, the user could delete his or her account and all of its information permanently (unlike the limited “Deactivate Account” option in Facebook), but it seems reasonable to suspect that users will typically present themselves with the initially proposed conundrum, since after all, staying with something so well established would be easier than picking up stakes, from the outset.

YDN is sustained by a mixed model of donation and advertisement. The site will not make as much money from advertisement due to their less focused nature. Donations will be relied upon for supplement, much the same as the Public Broadcasting System (PBS) and the internet’s Wikipedia. The banking information requirement will inherently make the process of donation easier, and could also lead to further possibilities of e-commerce, such as the facilitation of sales of goods between users. This could be by some tailored machination built from the models of e-bay, craigslist, and Amazon.com.

A large market exists for a social networking site that upholds the safety and security of its users, and You Dot Net is the answer. It’s unique and stringent registration process will cut down on unauthorized information leakage and make for a loyal user base. The lessons of the disaster of Friendster, the poor consistency of MySpace, and the privacy betrayals of Facebook will be taken as important lessons. The site is secure, simple, and pleasing to use – the “keep it simple, stupid” (KISS) design principles being held as sacred. Absolutely every detail, and all content, uploaded to the site by its users can be controlled by them, in a simple-to-use security-settings interface. It will operate on an advertisement and donation model in order to maintain operating costs and perhaps turn a profit. The banking-information requirement does well to facilitate the donation process, as well as e-commerce such as the sale of virtual and physical goods. The e-commerce of YDN could even be extended to involve sales and transactions of certain goods between users, using a model built from the experiences of service sites such as e-bay and amazon.com. The future of social networking is by and large uncertain, but one thing is very clear: so long as citizens have access to the internet, the demand for the social web will only continue to grow and strip away the lowly stamps of its origins, changing and mutating into something as yet unimagined. Above all, the user must feel safe in whatever that environment might be – and will demand it be secure.

References

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