Why I Joined the Facebook Privacy Changes Backlash…

Whenever Facebook rolls out a major change, there’s a backlash… Here’s why I posted recently about how to opt out of Facebook’s new services…

Firstly, I’m quite happy to admit that it might be that you will be benefit from opting in to the Facebook personaliation and behavioural targeting services. If you take the line that better targeted ads are content, and behavioural advertising is one way to achieve that, all well and good. Just bear in mind that your purchasing decisions will be even more directedly influenced ;-)

What does concern me is that part of the attraction of Facebook for many people are its privacy controls. But when they’re too confusing to understand, and potentially misleading, it’s a Bad Thing… (I suppose you could argue that Facebook is innovating in terms of privacy, openness, and data sharing on behalf of its users, but is that a Good Thing?)

If folk think they have set their privacy setting one way, but they operate in another through the myriad interactions of the different settings, users may find that the images and updates they think they are posting into a closed garden, are in fact being made public in other ways, whether by the actions of their friends, applications they have installed, pages they have connected to, or websites they visit.

The Facebook privacy settings also seem to me to suggest various asymmetries. For example, if think I am only sharing videos with friends, then if those friends can also share on content because of the way I have set/not changed the default on another setting, I may be publishing content in a way that was not intended. It seems to me that Facebook is set up to devolve trust to the edge of my network – I publish to the edge of the my network, for example, but the people or pages on the edge of my network can then push the content out further.

So for example, in the case of connecting to pages, Facebook says: “Keep in mind that Facebook Pages you connect to are public. You can control which friends are able to see connections listed on your profile, but you may still show up on Pages you’re connected to. If you don’t want to show up on those Pages, simply disconnect from them by clicking the “Unlike” link in the bottom left column of the Page.”

The privacy settings around how friends can share on content I have shared with them is also confusing – do their privacy settings override mine on content I have published to them?

I’m starting to think (and maybe I’m wrong on this) that the best way of thinking about Facebook is to assume that everything you publish to your Facebook network can be republished by the members of your network under the terms of their privacy conditions. So if I publish a photo that you can see, then I have to assume that you can also publish it under your privacy settings. And so on…

This contrasts with a view of each object having a privacy setting, and that by publishing an object, the publisher controls that setting. So for example, I could publish an object and say it could only be seen by friends of me, and that setting would stick with the object. If you treid to republish it, it could only be repulshed to your friends who are also my friends. My privacy settings would set the scope, or maximum reach, of your republication of it.

Regular readers will know I’ve started looking at ways of visualising Facebook networks using Gephi. What I’m starting to think is that Facebook should offer a visualisation of the furthest reach of a person’s data, videos, images, updates, etc, given their current privacy settings (or preview changes to that reach if they want to test out new privacy settings.

PS re the visualisation thing – something like this, generated from your current settings, would do the job nicely:

More at The Evolution of Privacy on Facebook, including a view of just how open things are now…