Openbook

» see youropenbook.org as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

The May 2010 Facebook privacy panic reached Turkey the way most American tech stories did that year, as a headline with no follow-up attached to it. Openbook was the specific object at the center of the story and i never saw the site while it was live. So this is reconstruction, and the reason i wanted to write it down is that Openbook belongs to a small category of internet things built with the explicit aim of destroying themselves.

On 21 April 2010 Facebook opened a search API over content that users had marked visible to Everyone. Three weeks later, on 12 May, two software engineers in San Francisco named Will Moffat and Peter Burns wired a search box to it, with James Home doing the design, and put the result on youropenbook.org. It took a few hours. The whole thing ran as static pages hosted on GitHub.

What it did was simple enough to be unpleasant. You typed a phrase and it returned real status updates from real accounts containing that phrase, with names and photos, because the people who wrote them had, knowingly or otherwise, set them to public. The demonstration searches people passed around were the obvious ones: things you would only say to a close friend, or things you would say about a boss. Nothing was hacked. Every word on the screen had been published by its author under settings the author had accepted.

The about page was blunt about the intent. The three of them described themselves as Facebook users concerned about privacy, and stated the goal as getting Facebook to restore the privacy of this information so that Openbook and sites like it would stop working. Their complaint was not that Facebook shared too much, exactly. It was that Facebook never made clear how public each thing was, and then changed the rules too often for anyone's understanding to stay accurate.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the two weeks ~

It got close to six million page views in fourteen days, from over a million people across more than two hundred countries. The Wall Street Journal covered it, NPR covered it in a segment about Facebook's privacy problem, ABC News covered it, and the story travelled well internationally because the demonstration needed no explanation in any language.

The timing is most of why it worked. Facebook had spent the spring of 2010 expanding what counted as public by default, and the backlash was already running. Openbook did not make an argument about that. It made the argument unnecessary by showing people their neighbors' status updates in a search box, which is a rhetorical move that no privacy policy analysis has ever matched.

~ how it actually ended ~

Facebook did narrow the API, and by the time the site moved from youropenbook.org to openbook.org in May 2012 the thing it was built to demonstrate had mostly been taken away from it. Two months later, in July 2012, Openbook was shut down for legal reasons. The domain became a foreign exchange site.

The afterlife is the strange part. Facebook built the same capability into its own product for logged-in users, then pulled it in January 2013, then replaced it in December 2014 with a version that searches only your own posts and posts from people you follow. So the feature Openbook was protesting was eventually killed by the company that built it, at the pace of a large company, with no announcement anyone remembers. Openbook asked to be made obsolete and got exactly that, roughly two years late and from a direction it could not claim credit for.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »