Comments on: Facebook’s New Privacy Settings: Too little, too late

By: mel

mel — Sat, 28 Mar 2009 22:57:19 +0000

I have selected the following privacy settings on facebook: “Friends Only” and “None of My Networks” yet my wall is public, and anyone can visit my profile, etc. Any suggestion? Thank you, Mel

By: Bertil Hatt

Bertil Hatt — Sat, 22 Mar 2008 16:56:00 +0000

After actively using it, I’ve the privacy update lacking: not in number of features (I was positively surprised to see that I could recommend my friends to a new friend) but in the way they are implemented; I cannot attach a context to photos by album, or to certain notes: I still have to declare that all my objects of the same type can be seen by certain type of people. Some photos, links can be innocuous, others not. Friend lists should be augmented to include those.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Sat, 22 Mar 2008 16:42:00 +0000

Hey Fred.

This is very interesting. I note that facebook used to have friendster-ish Friend of a friend privacy back in the day (2005), but shifted away back to the network model.

I think that danah points about multiple contexts being the death of friendster will likely play out on facebook, but more slowly, as it takes a while to feel the pain. For me, it's just too much like hard work to classify all the people in my list, so I can be bothered, and simply won't add information.

The benefits I got from facebook are ebbing away with it's drive towards being the tool for multiple contexts. This makes me sad. I wish it had stayed university only, as I thought it was brilliant then, and had a low psychological overhead as you had a pretty good guess as who your audience was.

Declinig pageviews and increasing privacy are a real problem for facebook - my first reaction the reinstatement of the FOAF privacy was that they must have noticed the lockdown on privacy and are trying to force their way into being relevant for everyone, but life isn't like that.

Icarus syndrome.

By: leafar.eu

leafar.eu — Fri, 21 Mar 2008 16:40:00 +0000

Impossible to remenber who is who !

I'vedeleted all my friends.

Rebuild it slowly using groups i've created or we are both in.

Group is the power of facebook.
Frienship is just about access.

Nice move anyway.

By: Bertil Hatt

Bertil Hatt — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 14:37:00 +0000

What you describe, and miss on Facebook, is group-size activity, political discussion?
Beyond friend of a friend, its basically almost strangers that you identify with a handle: militant, living in such or such area, life style.
I agree this is missing — and I thing this part should be happening on groups, at least this is what I’m seeing.
Group features are not perfect, I fully agree with that: we need the ability to comment on a group without embracing its opinion, we need to manage group visibility better then that: both hide your belonging to a public group and share with a list of friend your recent comment on a groups discussion thread. Hiding? Yes: if your position is frowned upon by a significant share of your relatives, you don’t feel like entering “~ and proud”. Once you have been talked into getting out of the closet (I’m using a Gay vocabulary, but this can apply to any opinion, orientation, view), then you can have a LiveJournal-like space.

In a nutshell: Facebook is too indivudalistic. A Forum app anyone?

By: fred

fred — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 14:24:00 +0000

As an "economist" (or one with training in economics) myself, one thing I've learned is that young people's behavior is less rational than we'd hope. So if there's a little cognitive dissonance, thats likely because there's nuance there. The rational actor model doesn't hold up as well in Facebook.

I think Facebook's end goal of increased sharing, by allowing privacy and context control, may happen. You're right on that. Some people will take advantage of this, and some people will share more as a result. No disagreement there.

The "too little, too late" argument stems from the fact this won't reverse current trends, and current trends are undeniable. Facebook is a social network where path transversal is incredibly difficult because of privacy, because all the doors are locked. In that sense it is the opposite of vibrant.

Important point here is to remember - friend lists solve the problem of sharing to certain contexts. So for people who are already private and segregated, they may share more to a subset of their friends. Friend-of-a-friend is an effort to expand the network, making to more browsable. Two different things here, but in both cases the end goal is more interesting content for more eyes.

By: Bertil Hatt

Bertil Hatt — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 13:39:00 +0000

Ok, your question is: this tool allows more control, will people be incited in sharing?

Control and incitation, let's have the economist step in:
We assume that providing information has benefits (being cool, making friends) and risks (getting stalked, indentiy theft).

On this point, you seem to be slightly contradictory: is sharing "more" information more risk or more benefit, and for who?

People used to share the information that had higher benefits for a share of their network then risk from the rest: nothing that could harm them (Facebook was not a collection of drunken tales anymore) so they were mostly minimizing irrelevance, and giving hardly any costly personal information. Facebook seems to have dragged towards a local version of digg.

Now I can post party photos -- and I won't, but my cousin will, and I'll share them, but I won't mish them with the party photos with my colleagues.

It might reduce serendipity: alumni midly interested on my work; it will improve relevancy. What would you rather have, what helped grow internet spectacularly: StumbleUpon or Google?

"Too little, too late" : I think introducing features late has the advantage of being able to rely on a campaign demanding it that helps you find the right defaults, and communicate better about it. News feed Privacy setting? Watchafujrizdat? Having a three day drama with a happy ending: poeple get out sour, but the vast majority of indifferent users know how, why and whether to use it. Too little? Same thing, it's a complex set of rules that have to be reinvented: gradual introduction is the best take. The last two crisis have proven one thing: Facebook can apologize, react and correct in a matter of days; long on Internet time or for people who update their page several pages day, flashing by anyone else's standard.

I'm happy. Could be better, will be better once it's road-tested, and I'm still working on my own remarks on Privacy with my Privacy Badges app -- but I'm happy.