Facebook’s new “privacy policy” is geared to make your Facebook activity less private. John Battelle’s pithy summary is “This is a big deal. Facebook is taking the final step to become more like Twitter.”
With the new policy you will have more granular control over who sees what in your profile, right down to controlling who sees each update, but you have to act to exercise this capability–it’s not the default. Also, now for the first time, some of your profile information is now public, meaning all 350 million FB subscribers can search for it and see it. You cannot change the settings for this public information.
In doing this, Facebook is taking on a tricky balancing act. On the one hand, they want to make the platform more open because it will be easier for Search Engines to spider the content, more appealing to application developers, and easier for advertisers to get information about you. On the other hand, the reason Facebook has all that delicious information about you in the first place is that it’s shared only with your network of friends. Opening that up to the world might not be such a good thing for you.
Full Publicity is the New Default
Let’s get clear about this. Facebook’s new policy is aimed at making their network more open and more public, more, well, Twitter-like. The default settings in your privacy controls were reset to the broadest public sharing settings and these are what Facebook is recommending. As ReadWriteWeb puts it, you have to opt out. As you’ll see below, it isn’t that easy to figure out your privacy settings option, and the surface options FB gives you aren’t really all there is to it. A little deceptive.
Most bloggers that have been following the latest Facebook flap are not surprised at this change. Facebook has publicly announced its intention to develop new privacy guidelines (back in July 2009), having learned a thing (maybe not two) from the ill-fated Beacon experiment.
But more broadly, it’s been clear for sometime that Facebook is struggling to open up its network. One takeaway from Jeremiah Owyang’s recent post on Facebook’s open strategy shifts is that the big players (Facebook, Google, Twitter, Yahoo! and so forth) are all converging on a huge social network platform in which social profiles (your online identity, remember?) are linked and shared across platforms – and opened up more to companies who want to know all about you. Yes, Virginia, there is a privacy issue.
Civil Libertarians Don’t Like It
The Guardian newspaper published an article focused on civil libertarians concerns about the changes. From the Electronic Frontier Foundation to the American Civil Liberties Union, watchdogs are concerned about the loss of privacy. At its core, the problem is that there are now some things that are considered public in Facebook that were not before.
For instance, did you know that some applications that run on Facebook (like polls and most games) get access to your profile information? They can use this to connect you with people you don’t know, and may expose some of your profile in the process. Or, someone in your Friend list who opts in to one of these applications may expose your information to others without you knowing it. Facebook is now posting an explanation of the new policy. You can link to this (as of right now) from your update box where you select how to distribute the post.
In other words, all Facebook subscribers expose at least some information about themselves to the public: “your publicly available information and information you share with Everyone.” Do you want to?
Facebook Misleads
In Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s December 9th letter posted to his profile and then shared with all of us, he claims the change gives us more control over who sees information we share. This is partly true.
The plan we’ve come up with is to remove regional networks completely and create a simpler model for privacy control where you can set content to be available to only your friends, friends of your friends, or everyone.
We’re adding something that many of you have asked for — the ability to control who sees each individual piece of content you create or upload. In addition, we’ll also be fulfilling a request made by many of you to make the privacy settings page simpler by combining some settings. If you want to read more about this, we began discussing this plan back in July.
Whoops! Not so, Mark! Now, you can share SOME of my information with anyone. Coupled with the default option being strongly biased to making all information public, this puts the burden of protecting privacy more on the individual subscriber.
Take Care of Your Information
It’s going to be up to you to manage your information. Here’s some starter steps, and good luck!
First, this is the image we all saw when Facebook rolled out the changes. It just asks you to go to the next page to set your privacy settings.
Facebook Privacy Announcement
The next page looks like you’ve hit paydirt until you read it. You find that the default buttons selected for you are all for the most open, public options. And your only real choice is the
Profile (ONLY) Privacy Settings
You can see I moved mine back to the “old settings” even though I’m a little hazy on what those are. Rolling over the radio buttons gives you an info box that tells you what the setting means, but it’s not too helpful anyway. The main problem is that these settings only control the profile sharing. They do not affect other factors, like applications sharing (many Facebook applications use your profile information, so they collect LOTS of information about you and about people you never heard of and share it around).
You have to go on to yet another screen that is not automatically suggested in this misleading exercise Facebook designed. Go to the upper right ‘Settings’ drop down and select Privacy Settings – the next screen looks like this:
Facebook Privacy Settings for All Functions
This is where you can set the privacy you want, with limits. As noted above, you cannot keep people from seeing certain information about you if you have a Facebook account.
I’m not sure how the publicly shared information will be used. Clearly, even knowing your location and gender gives important information to others. But I’m guessing the more potent marketing uses will involve searching and filtering your public information to make targeted lists. Think about it: you belong to a network, you live in a certain place, and your friends’ list includes others whose public information is also available. It’s not too hard to imagine someone collecting and analyzing this data.
What’s your take on the new Facebook?
