Why we are dropping our Facebook Bot
Here at LiveBetter.io our mission is to help people improve their wellbeing. Until recently we used to chat with our customers through a Facebook Messenger Bot… no longer.
Wait, what do you do?
What we do is quite simple — LiveBetter’s bots Lia & Liam reach out to our customers once a day for a quick chat. Through brief conversations our customers learn the research proven secrets to boosting their wellbeing and complete short exercises that are shown to boost everyday mental health.
Messenger was originally quite an interesting channel for us. Customer acquisition costs were low and long-term engagement incredibly high. Yet, a few months ago we stopped accepting new clients via Messenger and this past August 1st, when Facebook did a huge push on “app cleanup”, we decided to let our approval slide and focus exclusively on our iOS and Android apps.
Why did we drop Facebook? Three reasons.
1. We couldn’t guarantee privacy.
Although our core product concept is simple, often our customers share very private thoughts and feelings that they usually keep locked up in a place that has 100% guaranteed privacy… their minds.
Our promise to our customers is that what we do is 100% private and confidential. On Facebook, that is impossible
a) Facebook has access & rights to all content shared on Messenger, and as such they can use everything our customers share with us not only to personalize Facebook but also to aggregate and sell measurement solutions to third parties.
b) Facebook makes no effort to protect our customer’s privacy. For example, we hired someone to manage our social media and gave her access to our Facebook Page as a “marketing manager”. Guess what she got access to? all conversations anyone had ever had with our bot.
2. Facebook was sharing too much with us and too many places
Most of our customers want to stay anonymous. On our iOS and Android apps they can put a fake name and there is no requirement to put an email or phone number.
On Facebook, the story is a bit different.. the information we get “by default” is a name and a picture. So you obviously can’t be anonymous because we know your name… and anonymity is very important for our customers.
Second, a profile picture is more information than we want. Most profile pictures indicate age, race, gender… and sometimes much more. Now, you could say, “just ignore it” .. and we do .. but sometimes you can’t.
For example, Facebook had a weird bug where, with no change on my part, for several days I received a notification in my personal gmail account of all new inbound messages to our bot … which included the message, the profile picture and first and last names. Yeah. When I have to setup a gmail rule to auto-delete personal information you know Facebook isn’t trying hard enough.
3. Everything was… permanent.
Our minds change… we might write something today, but choose to delete it tomorrow. In our app we put delete buttons next to anything personal our customers share… we want them to be 100% in control over everything we store.
On Facebook, there is no API mechanism for us to delete any content. Once it’s shared on Messenger, Facebook knows about it forever….
In Closing
Facebook has made some progress on mental health — e.g., their partnership with Crisis Text Line to prevent suicide is wonderful — but they are still primarily and foremost a business.
Although the Messenger platform theoretically a wonderful opportunity to provide a wellbeing service, the complete lack of privacy, anonymity and permanence led us to conclude that we better focus our attention on dedicated iOS and Android apps where we can make real promises!