This morning, Facebook introduced some fairly significant updates to their privacy controls. Documented in this Facebook blog post, the changes are:
- Facebook has rolled out a consistent privacy interface, which allows access to shared elements based on access-control lists (i.e. work network, school network)
- These access-control lists (ACL’s) have been expanded to include ad-hoc groups of your creation. Therefore, it’s possible for you to share some elements with only your work friends, and others only with family, etc.
- Finally, Facebook has changed their network-based control model to allow friend-of-friend access. That is, you may now share things with your friends of friends that aren’t in existing networks. This is a big departure from Facebook’s operating plan to-date.
I want to begin by giving Facebook a lot of credit for the standardization move. As an outsider looking in, I’ve always sensed a HCI/UI-vs-BizDev disconnect when it comes to privacy. Facebook actually has very elegant and granular privacy controls, used most extensively by power users, but they’ve always been there. This attention to detail (the engineering and UI challenges of deploying item-level privacy are not trivial) always clashed with ham-fisted efforts like Beacon or privacy-less Newsfeed. Score one for the engineering team for the development of the consistent privacy interface, which is a good move.
Now let’s consider the business implications of these changes to Facebook’s privacy model. Facebook is trying to solve two problems here – the context problem and declining core-user pageviews. With regards to context, Facebook’s users are facing the problem of multiple contexts: what happens when my friends, my boss and my parents are all my Facebook friends. As Facebook becomes less about our everyday friends and more about our bosses and coworkers (or people you have to sit across from on Thanksgiving), Facebook naturally becomes less interesting, with people sharing less. It’s hard to manage these jumbled contexts, to know who you should and shouldn’t be disclosing to, especially when one has 500 or 1000 friends.
With context jumbling comes a natural move towards privacy. As Facebook has expanded, its cores users have increase privacy and shut their profiles off from the world. Gone are the days of wide-open Facebook; in a recent pilot survey of Facebook users (average age 25), 86% reported they use privacy settings in Facebook. Why? As more users have joined, as contexts have jumbled, Facebook has transitioned from a friendly community where no one kept locks on doors, to a normal, mundane community where one locks the door and shuts out strangers. Remembering the Facebook of 2005, this place where everyone shared with one another, one can’t help but wonder just what Facebook lost as it forced users to confront the real world via Facebook.
With the addition of contact lists, Facebook is taking a stab at solving the context problem. Theoretically, one can segregate one’s friends, family, best friends, roomates, and so on into private networks for selective sharing. Of course, when you have 500 contacts, it becomes rather difficult to remember who belongs where, or what lists contains what friends/family. Contact lists are bubblegum in the dam when it comes to the context problem; it will prove useful to some, but most hardcore users have such large networks that the contact-management process will be challenging. I expect most users to create one, maybe two groups. Of course, if they get value from that, it’s a win for Facebook.
By adding friend-of-friend optional sharing, Facebook is trying to address the smothering privacy trend moving through the system. In our pilot study, 88% of users reported viewing less than ten profiles a day, with 35% of users viewing less than three profiles per day. As privacy has increased, the value one gets from the browsing process has decreased. Have you tried to browse anyone’s friends recently? It seems that all you run into is private profiles. By allowing friend-of-friend connections, Facebook hopes to make browsing a popular function again, one that increases ad and page views. Newsfeed, cluttered with spam, has become less useful for generating pageviews – so Facebook is turning back to what made the service so initially valuable – our interest in one another.
I hate to say it, but this is a too-little, too-late move on Facebook’s part. Privacy is epidemic in the community, spurred by media narratives and self-regulation. Unlike Beacon or Newsfeed, these changes are an opt-in measure, meaning that only intentful users will switch their privacy settings. Unless Facebook figures out a neat gimmick to get people to buy in, they will have a challenge in pushing adoption.
Stepping back from this initiative, I think there’s a valuable lesson here for others managing virtual communities. Its much harder to ad-hoc technical fixes onto jumbled communities after the fact. It is also extremely hard to scale community effectively; Facebook’s initial segmentation allowed expansion without problems for some time, but ultimately, as the friend requests from the uncles and old friends you’ve never seen in ages pile up, the place became one where any rational person would be afraid to “live publicly.” Unfortunately, this cat is out of the bag for many of Facebook’s users, and I doubt that friend lists will solve the problem.
What do you think?
On an unrelated note, why does Facebook’s blog have a comment form if it doesn’t allow comments?
Fred Stutzman is a doctoral student, researcher and teaching fellow at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill's School of Information and Library Science. He studies how people use social media.
