Have you ever heard the saying Hubris goeth before the fall?

That's the hubris defined as: 

extreme haughtiness or arrogance. Hubris often indicates being out of touch with reality and overestimating one's own competence or capabilities, especially for people in positions of power. wikipedia

Or

  1. Excessive pride, presumption or arrogance (originally toward the gods).
  2. Unchecked arrogance; - wiktionary

Or

1. pride or arrogance
2.  (in Greek tragedy) an excess of ambition, pride, etc, ultimately causing the transgressor's ruin - Dictionary.com

Would you ever do business with a company, an employee, a consultant, a contractor, a partner, a vendor who brought you this proposition: 

Look. We're all about transparency and the lack of privacy.  We want you to be totally transparent with all your data at all times.Transparency and the lack of proviacy is our mission, our purpose. We're bringing it to you. Not us. No.

OUR world is about OUR mission: bringing transparency and the lack of privacy to you, the masses. Here in the office we like to refer to you as the un-private masses...that's a take on the unwashed masses thing we've heard about somewhere.

Ultimately, it's irrelevant whether you are or are not private or not. See, the T&C fine print says we own the data you share on our site. It's our site, not yours. So, we'll make you as transparent as we want you to be.

And while we post rules and settings and procedures to 'help' you keep some information private...(See T&C) we reserve the right to change the rules as... it best serves us. (See T&C, we own the data. It's our data. OUR data, OUR rules. ) No prior notice is promised. And, even if you thought it was or should be... we'd just use the 'whoops, we didn't know' defense.

And you'll need to invest a lot of your time and the time of your friends, whose data we own too, in order to embarass us enough to use the "whoops we didn't know defense."

Ultimately, here's a simple rule of thumb. Your data becomes OUR data when you put it on OUR site. OUR site, OUR rules. Not so hard to understand, really. 

OUR site, OUR rules, OUR world. Your world needs to be transparent. Not OUR world. See the difference? 

And did you see the latest article about how we're changing YOUR world? We're making it OUR world.

OUR world is about generating a new reality from sharing your data. That new reality generates a lot of money for us. Your data becomes OUR data becomes OUR money. See how that works?

Your data makes OUR money as we make your data OUR data and share what's now OUR data  with OUR partners. 

Who are our partners? Well...you don't need to know. And we're not telling you anyway. They're OUR partners. OUR partners for OUR site. See? Not yours.

How will we share your information? See above.

 Would you do business with a partner like this?

Of course, not. But we do...500 million of us build sites and bring our families and friends and customers....CUSTOMERS...to Facebook under these terms.

Maybe, it's hubris of me to question Facebook's business model. I mean after all I have two pages; 1 for me and 1 for my radio show. And I and 500 million users let ourselves be used into thinking it's our page. And Facebook played a big role in allowing for citizens in Tunisia and Egypt to build and open a platform for their voices to be heard. Cool.

(Empowerment. That's what we're about.)

Besides, no one holds a gun to OUR head and forces us to join.

Maybe, it's not hubristic of me. Maybe, it's just me stepping above my station.

Or refusing to go quietly into the night.

Maybe.

I'm just not sure how this works to our advantage. This business model that is so one-sided. How is the data handled, protected, shared from those democracy movements...with Facebook's dinner partners?

Sure, it's the freemium model. But behind this freemium model of Facebook is the hidden opportunity costs when our data is used without our knowledge to make their revenues.

That's not a very transparent business model, now is it. Nor is it free. It's not a very democractic model, either. We all know that secrets and secret policies are anathema to both free markets and free democracies. 

But it has all the symptoms of a business model that goeth before its fall.

Kindred Spirits

* David Armano's Facebook Wants to Boil Frogs

* YapTime's Blog

Update (...already?)

I'd been thinking about this post, this business model hubris of Facebook's for awhile. And what kicked me into writing gear was this excellent post by Social Fish: Five Reasons Why Facebook Will Never Replace Your Website. The URL for my post reflects their inspiration.

I forgot to give them a shout. They write a great blog, there.