Tag Archives | Privacy

The new-and-improved privacy settings which Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced on Wednesday have landed in my Facebook account. When I read Zuckerberg’s description of them, I was cautiously optimistic. Having spent a bit of time exploring them, I’m way less enthusiastic.

Facebook privacy is such a complex topic that you could write a book about it. (Seriously.) But most gripes fall into two general, seemingly contradictory categories:

• Facebook doesn’t give users enough control over privacy!
• Hey, Facebook provides such a dizzying array of privacy controls that it’s hard to figure out what’s going on!

Making privacy easy while providing lots of control is a fundamentally thorny challenge. If Facebook has failed to nail it, it’s not because the company is stupid, evil, or careless–it’s because this stuff is hard. Its response seems to be based in part on the philosophy that privacy is to a great extent about what you want shared with which types of people.

So the centerpiece of the new settings is a grid that shows three kinds of people (“Everyone,” Friends of Friends,” and “Friends Only”) and a bunch of types of information you store on Facebook, from your status to your snail-mail address. But there’s no explanation of what the grid is showing you. It’s just not that obvious whether it indicates your current settings, or ones you might want, or what.

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For years, Facebook has had a pretty consistent modus operandi: It breaks stuff, catches flack for it, and then–eventually–backpedals or otherwise responds to the criticism. The tradition continues with CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s new blog post. After a few weeks of intense unhappiness over the company’s recent new features and related changes to privacy policies, it’s redoing its privacy settings in a major way.

Zuckerberg says that the new features will take a few weeks to reach every Facebook user. I don’t see them yet. But here’s a recap of what he says is new:

• Rather than having to wade through gazillions of granular settings, it’ll be easy to tell Facebook you want anything you post to be visible to friends only, friends of friends, or everybody. These rules will apply to future Facebook functionality that doesn’t exist yet.
• You’ll be able to make your Friends and Pages lists completely private.
• It’ll be easier to block apps on Facebook from getting at your information.
• It’ll be easier to block external sites such as Pandora which use Facebook’s new “Instant Personalization” from getting at your information. (Currently there’s no single place to go to do this, nor any way to block all sites with one click.)
• If users find these changes satisfactory, Facebook intends to avoid major changes to privacy policies “for a long time.”

It’s a given that these tweaks won’t satisfy every unhappy camper. For example, it sounds like Facebook will still share your info via Instant Personalization by default; if this bothers you, you’ve got to proactively tell it to knock it off. Some people, like my colleague Jacqueline Emigh, would be more pleased if Facebook renounced Zuckerberg’s recent proclamation that “the default is social” and made every new form of sharing opt-in rather than opt-out.

Overall, though, the changes look like a significant step in the right direction. If you were rattled by the previous round of changes–as 75 percent of Technologizer readers who took our recent poll said they were–do the ones outlined in Zuck’s new post calm you down?

In the wake of ongoing controversy (some of it intense) over Facebook’s privacy policies, I’m overdue to return to the topic. (One-sentence summary of my take: Facebook has a history of asking for forgiveness rather than permission, and now says the default for everything is “social”–so the best way to keep things private is to keep them off the service, period.)

For now, here are a couple of worthwhile reads:

The New York Times got Facebook VP for Public Policy Elliot Schrage to respond to a bunch of reader questions. Schrage prefaces his answers with a humble, apologetic overview, but most of the specific answers seem to boil down to two somewhat testy points: 1)  everybody has the option not to use Facebook, and/or 2) the question mischaracterizes Facebook positions or practices. My main takeaway: Facebook needs to do a heck of a better job at explaining what it does with our information, and how we can exert control over it. Schrage’s comments do give me some hope that the company gets that.

Eric Eldon of Inside Facebook has a clarifying, level-headed walkthrough of what Facebook’s recent changes (and a security glitch or two) mean for privacy on the service.  It’s an exceptionally long post, but there’s so much to talk about that it’s hard to do it justice in a few hundred words.

And how are you feeling about Facebook these days?

(Here’s another story I wrote for FoxNews.com.)

If you think the whole Web is suddenly looking more like Facebook, you’re not imagining things. At its developer conference last week, the 800-pound gorilla of social networks made a bevy of announcements — and all the biggies involved intermingling your life as a Facebook user with other activities around the Internet.

For instance, a new Like button that’s already been rolled out on countless sites — including FoxNews.com — lets you “Like” items such as news articles, and see which your Facebook pals have liked. You can do so right at the site in question, but every time you click Like, your recommendation gets posted to your wall at Facebook, too.

Facebook is working with a handful of sites to implement even tighter integration. Listen to music at Pandora, for instance, and the online radio service may play music by artists that you’ve expressed a fondness for back on Facebook.

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