Fred StutzmanThoughts about information, social networks, and privacy

This evening, I went to approve a friend request on Facebook, only to find that I was now forced to fill out the details of my friendship with this individual. Had we lived together or worked togther? Had we met randomly, or through Facebook? Apparently, no longer do we have the option of keeping this information to ourselves – all of the details of our friendships must now be public.

Yes, I know I was a little hard on Facebook in my last post, but unannounced, unexplained changes like these can wreak havoc on the already turbulent ecosystem of FB. Furthermore, this top-down mandate is going to leave a lot of users unhappy; people like having the ability to choose how much information they make public. Facebook may not know this, but forcing people to publicly describe friendships is going to make a lot of people uncomfortable – they like having the flexibility to keep parts of their life private. It’s essentially silly to boil down something as complicated as all of your friendships into 12 pithy categories. What about the people you grew up with? Where’s the “met them at age 5 on my block” category?

Facebook has likely instituted this change for two reasons. The first is part of the overall “radical transparency” movement espoused by the techno-libertarian leadership of the company. They feel that all information should be public, if you’re not doing anything wrong, why worry, etc. So this is likely part of an overall strategy. The reason it happened now, i.e. the second part, is to stem the rampant “non-friend friending” that is going on amongst new joiners. Look at this blog post, the author brags about how many thousands of friends he has, and how elite they are. I have to imagine that even FB employees have to be a little mortified in seeing their system become nothing more than a rolodex – I’ve heard it called “the next Plaxo.”

Of course, instituting changes to control behavior at one edge of the ecosystem will affect other parts, and the longtime users are the ones who will be most displaced by this change. And it is a significant change – “friendship” is at the core of Facebook, and to now have to fit every friendship into Facebook thin lens will make many uncomfortable. Just as with the newsfeeds, in which the nature of friendship was instantly changed, now every friendship must make the uncomfortable dance of description. It’s really too bad – this feels like such a Friendster moment.

Update – Blake Ross responds: “This is a bug that will be fixed shortly. Note that even now, you need not enter any information.” I respond to Blake in the comments.

Sometime in the past few weeks, Facebook began exposing profiles to be indexed by Google (A search today returns over 350,000 profiles). Granted, profiles are still private, but how will people feel about their profile being indexed in Google? At the same time, there seems to be no way to turn this functionality off, and Facebook help documents have no mention of this new “feature.”

These types of context-leaps have caused problems for Facebook in the past. When newsfeeds were turned on with no privacy, Facebook failed to understand that privacy was both quantitative and qualitative. A context jump from “searchable within Facebook” to “searchable in Google” is a big deal. The fact Facebook was not upfront with its users in saying “we’re going to be letting Google in to index our userbase” is troubling. Even more troubling is the seeming inability to opt in or out of this service. I’d rethink this approach.

Update: French reader provides advice on how to turn public profiles off. To do so, deselect “everyone” in search privacy. This turns off the public profile. You can then re-enable the rest of the options to make yourself widely searchable in Facebook. Thanks to French reader for this important bit of information.

Update 2: Anonymous commenter writes: Facebook listened. Go to the search privacy page and there’s an option to shut this off now. Great news!