On Facebook, there are many tiers of information. Things like name or age I don’t care if anyone sees. All that stuff is easily available anyway. But if I post some, um, compromising pictures, I don’t immediately want every one of my hundreds of friends notified.

If relationships could be better defined then privacy and identity would be a lot easier to control.

I feel like the biggest mistake Facebook made was in the rollout of the feed system. They should have given users a heads-up about the feature in advance of the launch and explained to users the benefit of the feed system and the related privacy issues (and include steps on how to control privacy). From all the comments I’ve read, I think people are negative because they logged into Facebook this morning and saw that a detailed log of their actions on the site is now in the public domain.

If I put my cell phone # on my profile, that is my choice and I do so knowing that it will be publicly available. Facebook did not give users the choice to publish their action history via the News Feed. They just went ahead and did it. Sure, the user can go back and delete individual items from their feed but it’s not hard to see why tons of Facebook users are having knee-jerk reactions of anger due to privacy invasion feelings. Users felt like they’ve lost full control of their Facebook identity.

I think it’s interesting that Facebookers are responding within Facebook in many different ways besides the “official” channel (the blog). They’re using features such as the developers’ forum, their current status, notes, and groups. Most of these ways utilize the new feed system. For example, in one of the many new groups denouncing “Facebook Big Brother”, one person wrote that he found out about the group via the news feed. I’d also say that the developer’s group, which is officially about coding with the Facebook API, has increased 50% today due to people wanting to vent on the board (it went from about 1400 to 2100).

So to say they feel uneasy because of an new source of information is absurd. Logging onto the internet in general has done away with privacy.

Brenden Ferguson

Additionally, what’s kind of amazing to me is that if you couldn’t really ask for a better “test” of how SNS users adapt to the revelation of privacy limitations if you had designed it yourself. I’d agree that this probably isn’t what the Facebook folks had in mind while they were designing these changes – would that more corporations plotted their behavior for maximally useful research purposes! – but maybe not.

In any event, this is almost certainly a case where the genie can’t be put back in the bottle – “Surprise! You’re being watched!“