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Google is filled up with some of the smartest people around; or at least, it's really hard to qualify for and get a job there. Tales of the interview process can be found all over the web. Now, they compete with Facebook for that same pool of smartypants job applicants. Facebook also, reportedly, has a pretty strict screening process and has actually started hiring people away from Google. Yet, even with all those smart people, they both made the same stupid mistake at roughly the same time in their respective histories. A mistake that the entire dumbw orld seemingly could have warned them about.

After the success of the Google search engine, Google expanded into web mail. It would be bigger and better than all the other services and it would be free, offset by the cost of advertising based on the contents of each email. While I didn't personally see this as a big issue (an email about a cookie recipe seems like a good place to have an advertisement for chocolate) but it's so easy to see the problem with this. With all the sensitive information exchanged in email, people may not always want some company's giant computers reading through their messages looking for the best ad to go with it. The privacy implications of that were so big and obvious, and they've been documented hundreds of times, that I won't bother going into it here.

Then along comes Facebook, heir apparent to the social network throne. They build up a huge base of users and want to leverage that base to try and justify a $15B valuation. They didn't quite have the same plan as Google. Google was going to give you a new free service, an opt-in service, and advertise to you in questionable ways. Facebook wasn't going to actually offer anything new. They just teamed up with other sites to record, and then publish, the shopping habits of each Facebook user. So, buying a fancy ring for your wife would get posted to all of your Facebook friends and, yes, even your wife. You had to opt-out of this. Opt-out!? Facebook has since changed this to an opt-in program, but that isn't the way it launched.

How does this happen? How do you get so many smart people together to make such bone-headed decisions? This isn't an issue of them moving too quickly. Projects like these take time, lots of meetings are involved. PR people come in, marketing, programmers, suits, QA, friends, family, etc. At some point someone along the way must have stopped and said, "You know, a lot of people will love this idea, but some people might think it's a privacy issue or just plain creepy. Any thoughts?" After that, they just kept on going. Someone must have suggested that Facebook Beacon should be an opt-in program, but they decided against it. If no one ever raised these concerns, they've just hired a bunch of 'yes' men, and I really don't think that is the case. So I figure they must have thought about these issues, both at Facebook and Google. Google seemed to be prepared in a way, their plan was just to ignore it, and they just weathered the storm for the most part. Facebook, on the other hand, crumbled like a sand castle.

I've worked on a lot of sites, we've had a lot of discussions about a lot of features. Sometimes, we'll toss around an idea that could fall into this trap. But, each and every time someone points it out. It may be in the initial meeting, or perhaps after a few days of work on the project when someone says, "Hey, I think those privacy wing-nuts may have a problem with us physically following our users into the drug store and publishing their prescriptions, what do you think?" And then we realize that just because a feature is a good idea for one reason, it may be a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad idea for some other reason.

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