What were they thinking?
Privacy is the single biggest concern facing Facebook users, and Facebook knows it. They used to offer detailed privacy settings that enabled users to publish–or keep private–any aspect of their profiles. Most importantly, users could completely hide their profiles from strangers, but not anymore. Facebook’s new privacy settings change all of that, and it’s really bad for the users. Worst of all, users don’t generally understand what they’ve lost, and that Facebook’s interests are now fundamentally opposed to their own.
Let’s recap why privacy is important. As Facebook became ubiquitous, employers started using Facebook to check on the extracurriculars of their (potential) employees. Otherwise strangers started “friending” people, claiming connections from college, high school, or even earlier. Marketers realised that demographic data from Facebook was a gold mine. Many Facebookers came to realise that their online identities needed to be protected just as carefully as their real identities.
The smarter Facebookers among us carefully trimmed their friends lists, exercised discretion in who they added to their friends lists, and hid their profile from the public. I was one of these users. I took the time to learn Facebook’s myriad privacy settings and came to appreciate their power and granularity. I trimmed my list from 675 to 275 “friends,” and, in most cases, didn’t hear a single word of complaint from the 400 who didn’t make the cut–I hardly knew them anyway. My profile–and the content thereupon–was entirely hidden from anybody who wasn’t my “friend.” In other words, nobody who I hadn’t personally pre-approved had any access. They also couldn’t tell that I had one, except through the activities of mutual friends, like tagged photos or wall comments. If someone found me, he couldn’t see any of my profile, my profile picture, nor could he “friend” me. If someone wanted to get in touch, he could send me a message and introduce himself–much like a real person would. In short, my Facebook experience was very much integrated with my personal life, and the detailed settings allowed me the discretion to be myself around my friends and not worry about stalking, harassment, or anyone using my profile content against me.
Facebook hated this. ”Fuck you,” they seemed to say.
Facebook’s Chris Kelly blogged July 1st, 2009 that we’d be seeing a revamping of privacy settings, and was “glad to be offering you more control.” Mr. Zuckerberg himself blogged about upcoming changes to profile confidentiality settings, which seemed to consist almost entirely of implementing per-item publisher privacy settings and retiring regional networks. Then, December 9th, somebody set us up the bomb and “Ruchi Sanghvi, Facebook’s product manager for privacy, [was] in control“:
With these changes, a limited set of basic information that helps your friends find you will be made publicly available. This information is name, profile picture, gender, current city, networks, friend list, and Pages. The overwhelming majority of people who use Facebook already make most or all of this information available to everyone. We’ve found that most people who do limit access just want to avoid being found in searches or prevent contact from strangers. For this reason, we’ll be preserving the settings that allow you to exclude yourself from search results on Facebook and public search engines.
Emphasis mine. This information wasn’t always necessarily publicly available, and there’s a big difference between hiding yourself from search results and hiding your profile entirely. These days, all you need to stalk someone is her Facebook URL (e.g. http://facebook.com/default.aspx). Your profile page is now public even if you hide yourself from strangers’ search results. Stalkers or identity thieves only have to be logged in, which is now incredibly easy since even creepy old Uncle Larry can sign up. And, according to Facebook’s new policy, that page will always show the user’s name, gender, profile picture, current city, networks, and their “fan of” list. This is true no matter what your old privacy settings were. If you thought you were copying over your old settings to the new system when you selected “old settings,” you were wrong. If you’re a father who uses his child’s picture in his profile, anybody can now see and download that picture, and you’re probably going to be pretty pissed. You can hide your friends list from your profile page, but it’s still technically publicly available:
Now when you uncheck the “Show my friends on my profile” option in the Friends box on your profile, your Friend List won’t appear on your profile regardless of whether people are viewing it while logged into Facebook or logged out. This information is still publicly available, however, and can be accessed by applications.
What use is that? I like the idea of my friends being able to see my friends list; it makes it easier for people to connect. Why would I ever tell strangers the names of all my friends? Why would Facebook make these changes? All the reasons I can imagine boil down to profits over privacy. Public friends lists might be convenient for Facebook’s advertising system, because making all that information publicly available means marketers can take and use whatever they want without your permission. However, it’s clearly not in the best interests of any individual user, and it feels like a huge violation of user trust, at least among those who cared enough to keep their profiles private. Further, the value of Facebook to Facebook is in the integrity of the information it contains about its users, not necessarily in the security thereof. Facebook demands your real name, your real birthday, your real email address, and your actual gender, all of which is potentially sensitive data and should be protectable–in some cases it’s enough to break into someone’s webmail account. With public profile pictures, Facebook has yet another way of showing advertisers, “Hey, our site is full of real people, and hey, this one’s actually Asian, Black, White, Latino” or whatnot much unlike MySpace, which is now worth “next to nothing.” Keep in mind that Facebook tracks your activity behind the scenes; almost every link on the site is scripted so that when you click on it, Facebook can record how you got there, for what you were searching, and even more information–and you can bet that they know exactly which profiles and pages you have visited, which photos you’ve viewed, and how often. You can be certain that what you see in your news feed is only a fraction of the activity Facebook is recording. How long before more of this is permanently public?
I’m sorry; my personal life is not simply a way for Mark Zuckerberg to make money, especially not when Facebook has made it so easy to be stalked by complete strangers. I have tentatively deactivated my Facebook account and I hope that Facebook will abolish its policy of making any information publicly available regardless of the user’s preferences. I’m sure there are millions of users who don’t care and are worse off for it, but I value my privacy a little too much to make it that easy for strangers to find my profile.
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