Facebook & Your Privacy

Published: May 29, 2010 | Author: Adam Smith

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Facebook Privacy Concerns

In the face of mounting criticism about user privacy since recent changes announced at Facebook’s f8 conference in April, CEO Mark Zuckerberg has announced further changes to Facebook’s privacy options.

Have the concerns from every day users, politicians and special interest groups like the those organizing the ‘Quit Facebook Day‘ on May 31st forced Facebook into a backflip or just a temporary submission?

Issues with privacy have dogged Facebook in recent years, but people continue to join by the millions. At this stage just over 23000 users have pledged to quit Facebook on the 31st, but it is suggested that more people will sign up in an single hour or two on that day and simply replace them. With a user base of 400 million – is Facebook really that concerned?

Facebook – A Great Way To Catch Up

No doubt that Facebook is a great tool to catchup with family and friends, past and present – but with Facebook’s seemingly endless pursuit to ingrain themselves into every facet on the internet – does privacy matter to them or you anymore?

Recent tools that share your current location to advertising based on suggestions of friends are all possible due to the information users share on Facebook. Facebook want to be at the center of providing this information to maintain it’s revenues and with sharing API’s that allow anyone to add things like the ‘like’ button to their own sites facilitates this.

The new controls

The new controls have been announced to simplify who has access to your information and how it’s linked to 3rd party sites and applications. In a significant simplification, Facebook have reduced the number of options from 170 to something that is easy to manage and understand. Once these controls are set they will also act retrospectively to your previous posts and application settings removing the need to go back adjust each individually.

The new controls will be rolled out over the next few weeks. Until they are available to you, see an independent view of how the new controls work by reading Mashable’s ‘How Facebook’s New Privacy Controls Work‘ blog.

Zuckerberg’s Response to Users Concerns

The following is taken from Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook Blog which details what was behind the changes at f8 and what they are doing to address their users concerns. If you are concerned about your data being available to 3rd parties without your knowledge or understanding, I’d suggest reading the whole blog.

When we started Facebook, we built it around a few simple ideas. People want to share and stay connected with their friends and the people around them. When you have control over what you share, you want to share more. When you share more, the world becomes more open and connected.

Today, I want to share some thoughts on how we’ve evolved to this point, what we’re doing now to give you more control, and what you can expect from us going forward.

Looking back, the first version of Facebook was very simple. There were almost no features. There were no status updates, photo albums or messages. There was no News Feed or Platform. The only people who could use it were college students in the United States.

The way the site worked was that everyone could see some basic information about you and the rest of your information was only visible to people in your networks and your friends by default.

As the site grew and as we rolled out new features, Facebook became less about colleges and more about sharing lots of content with different groups of people. So a little more than a year ago, we started working on a new privacy model to reflect how the site had evolved.

As News Feed became more central to your experience, we added privacy settings so you could control who could see each individual status update, photo album, video and everything else you share into the stream.

As Platform became more popular, we restricted the way applications could access your personal information. Now all applications and websites can only see content that is already visible to everyone. They must get permission to access anything else.

As regional networks grew to include more and more people, we decided to phase them outsince they were too big for you to effectively control your information. While this was not a big issue in the United States, more than 50 percent of you worldwide were in networks that spanned whole countries like India and Turkey.

Replacing regional networks meant we needed a new model for control. In general, we recommended that you share basic info like status updates and posts with everyone, content like photos and videos of you with friends of your friends, and sensitive items like contact information with only your real friends. We asked each of you to look at your settings and choose what you wanted.

More recently, we also launched community pages and other ways to give you personalized and social experiences on other sites you use.

Since then, you have sent us lots of feedback. We’ve listened carefully in order to figure out the best next steps. We recognize that we made a lot of changes, so we really wanted to take the time to understand your feedback and make sure we address your concerns.

The number one thing we’ve heard is that there just needs to be a simpler way to control your information. We’ve always offered a lot of controls, but if you find them too hard to use then you won’t feel like you have control. Unless you feel in control, then you won’t be comfortable sharing and our service will be less useful for you. We agree we need to improve this.

Today we’re starting to roll out some changes that will make all of these controls a lot simpler. We’ve focused on three things: a single control for your content, more powerful controls for your basic information and an easy control to turn off all applications.

To see the whole post with a detailed explanation of each option click here

These new tools certainly make it easier to control who see’s you’re information but is it enough to stop the groundswell of concern and mistrust?

Read Mashable’s CEO and Founder Pete Cashman’s story at CNN.com where he thinks Facebook’s privacy concerns will continue.

Treat All Information As Public Information

It may be simply safer to treat all the information you share on Facebook as being publicly available, regardless of your settings. This way any information you share won’t potentially come back to embarrass you and harm your future work prospects or relationships.