Facebook Has Powerful Friends; Will Users Suffer?

President Obama shares a laugh with Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg during a town hall meeting earlier this year on reducing the national debt.

MONTAGNE: Before Mr. Obama visited Joplin, he was in France for the G8 Summit, and one of the people he spoke with in France was Facebook's founder Mark Zuckerberg. It's not the first time they've met. In fact, Mr. Obama and other politicians have many reasons to friend Facebook, it can connect them with voters and it can help them raise money. And Facebook announced, this week, that it's ramping up its presence in Washington, D.C. with a slate of new hires.

Here's NPR's White House correspondent, Ari Shapiro.

ARI SHAPIRO: President Obama has done pretty well on Facebook. He recently told an audience at a San Francisco fundraiser that he has 19 million friends.

President BARACK OBAMA: Which only puts me half a million friends behind Sponge Bob Square Pants.

SHAPIRO: He's also friendly with Facebook executives. During a town hall meeting at the company's Palo Alto headquarters, Mr. Obama introduced himself as the man who got company founder Mark Zuckerberg to give up the hooded sweatshirt.

President OBAMA: The first time we had dinner together and he wore this jacket and tie, I think, halfway through dinner, you know, he's starting to sweat a little bit; it's really uncomfortable for him, so I helped him out of his jacket.

SHAPIRO: All this coziness makes some privacy activists uncomfortable. Jeff Chester runs the Center for Digital Democracy.

Mr. JEFF CHESTER (Center for Digital Democracy): The Obama administration holds the keys to Facebook's future. I mean, I think the president should have been much more cautious when he stood up there with Mark Zuckerberg.

SHAPIRO: Facebook has more than 600 million members. About half of them visit the website more than once a day to share photographs, describe their feelings, or like a band. All that activity means Facebook owns a huge amount of information about a huge number of people. And the rules for what the company can do with that information are still being written.

Mr. REY RAMSEY (CEO, TechNet): So many members of Congress who are going to be weighing into this issue are users of Facebook.

SHAPIRO: Rey Ramsey is CEO of TechNet, a political and policy network of tech companies that includes Facebook. He believes politicians writing new internet privacy rules can be impartial, even though those same politicians depend on Facebook for fundraising and communications. After all, Ramsey says, the government regulates all kinds of industries that politicians use every day.

Mr. RAMSEY: We use electricity, but we have an agency that oversees that.

SHAPIRO: This concept of Facebook as a utility that people cannot live without in the modern world, like electricity, water, or gas, is also gaining traction among Facebook's critics. Christine Rosen, of the American Enterprise Institute, is editor of a technology journal called The New Atlantis.

Ms. CHRISTINE ROSEN (Editor, "The New Atlantis"): If you don't like your power company or your water company, in the United States you likely have very few alternatives. The same is true, I think, with social networking in this country and, quite frankly, globally, Facebook dominates. So I think people are using it as they're turning on a light switch or they're turning on their water. So it might be helpful to start thinking about some of the questions that raises in terms of how the government should look at it.

SHAPIRO: Facebook, which declined to comment for this story, does not like people to call it a utility. After all, anyone can create a competing social network. And more to the point, utilities are heavily regulated. Already the government is moving towards stronger privacy regulations online. The Obama administration released a policy framework last year, and a bill in the Senate looks similar to the administration's proposal. Ohio State Law professor Peter Swire was President Clinton's privacy advisor, and he was the lawyer to the Obama social media team during the presidential transition two years ago.

Professor PETER SWIRE (Law Professor, Ohio State University, President Clinton's privacy advisor): When it comes to privacy, the administration has a split within its personality. The campaign was based on motivating people through social networks. On the other hand, the administration is supporting unprecedented privacy protections. Working that out is tough for society and it's a split within the administration as well.

SHAPIRO: One administration official who works on these issues remarked that Facebook has disproportionately little contact with the White House compared to other big tech companies. But Facebook is trying to change that. The hires they announced are the first step to catching up with companies like Google and Microsoft in Washington. Ed Black is CEO of the computer and communications industry association. He argues that these growing ties between politicians and Facebook will have no impact whatsoever on the ultimate set of privacy rules.

Mr. ED BLACK (CEO, Computer and Communications Industry Association): Can you really imagine that Facebook's going to shut off one third of the Congress who voted against them on something and not give them access? Do you realize how absolutely absurd that would be?

SHAPIRO: While politicians do have an interest in using Facebook, they also have an interest in privacy. Elected officials are at least as worried as the rest of the world about what personal details of their lives online could someday be revealed.

Ari Shapiro, NPR News, Washington.

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