The Web and “Street Cred”

I’m going on five weeks now since I canceled my Facebook account. At the time, Open Graph had not been released, and the issues surrounding Facebook’s privacy policy changes were just a tiny ripple in the social Internet ocean. I learned about the proposal initially from this TechCrunch article and was immediately mortified. Not long after, I canceled and deleted my account, going through the same hoops now famously chronicled by Leo Laporte when he deleted his Facebook account (video below, a fun one).

And here we are, about a month removed from the release of Open Graph and the flood of Like buttons on the web in places that you’ve never been to before. Politicians, online privacy wonks, and the “social network conscious” are complaining loudly about not just the invasion of privacy, but the silly, convoluted method in place to permanently delete your account (watch Leo again if you missed this).

Cue ReclaimPrivacy.org. While the tool is going through some growing pains, I love it because of its functional mission (helping users easily identify, and tweak, their Facebook privacy settings), but I love the website even more. It’s easy to read. It’s lightweight. It’s standards-compliant. There are no advertisements. Their FAQs are simple to follow. But most of all, it is completely transparent – anyone can view the source code and track bug statuses at their GitHub repository.

What I think is most fascinating is how this kind of grassroots activism on the Web lends additional credibility to the developer. If McAfee or Symantec recognized this as a market opportunity, and sold a similar tool for a buck, would people still use it? I doubt it.  Those are established brands, yet we trust them less than a developer that has zero exposure or public track record. The appearance of their website, to me, puffs up this image of web “altruism”. This appearance obviously doesn’t work for everyone, but overall I think this is a classic example of less clearly being more.