Could Facebook have grown its community to hundreds of millions of users so quickly if it had not promised to protect the privacy of its users? I suspect the answer is "no." Users trusted Facebook, and they signed up in droves.Evidently, the company feels it has grown big enough that it can rescind its earlier promises about data privacy and weather whatever micro-storm of protest ensues. As has been much reported, the company is changing its privacy policies and—just as importantly—its UI for controlling privacy settings.
The policies now lean toward disclosure rather than containment. The new UI controls require one to click, click, click with the perseverance of a busy switchboard operator to regain most of the privacy one enjoyed a few months ago. Alas, it's impossible to regain all of it.
Facebook wants to ensure that it and its partners have access to as much personal information as possible. That's how they'll make money.
Their loosey-goosey manner of opening the floodgates leaves users vulnerable to all sorts of hacks, exposing private data not just to Facebook and its partners, but also to any hacker or marketer with sufficient diligence and cunning. (See Wired Magazine's article, Rogue Marketers Can Mine Your Info on Facebook.)
Users, understandably, are unhappy. Fifteen organizations have banded together to file a complaint to the FTC. User defections are becoming more common and well publicized. Facebook management is scrambling to the respond.
For a quick summary of what's changed, what's new, and how exposed your own Facebook account is, consult the following.
Analysis
Electronic Frontier Foundation
Facebook's Eroding Privacy Policy: A Timeline
Updated: Facebook Further Reduces Your Control Over Personal Information
Quote from this second article:
Today, Facebook removed its users' ability to control who can see their own interests and personal information. Certain parts of users' profiles, "including your current city, hometown, education and work, and likes and interests" will now be transformed into "connections," meaning that they will be shared publicly. If you don't want these parts of your profile to be made public, your only option is to delete them. . . .
But even for an innocuous interest like cooking, it’s not clear how this change is meant to benefit Facebook's users. An ordinary human is not going to look through the list of Facebook's millions of cooking fans. It's far too large. Only data miners and targeted advertisers have the time and inclination to delve that deeply.
New York Times
Facebook Privacy: A Bewildering Tangle of Options (a chart showing the hierarchy of Facebook's new privacy settings)
Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada
Report of Findings into the Complaint Filed by the Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic (CIPPIC) against Facebook Inc. Under the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (2009)
Wired Magazine
Public Posting Now the Default on Facebook (December 2009)
Quote:
Facebook estimates that 80 to 85 percent of its users have stuck with the default privacy settings, which means hundreds of millions of users will soon be publishing to the entire net, by default when they type into their status box. The previous defaults for status updates were “Friends of Friends” and networks, including geographic ones with millions of users, while photos defaulted to everyone.
Audit Tools
Profile Watch: Scans your privacy settings and rates your exposure on a scale of 1 to 10.
ReclaimPrivacy.org: Scans your Facebook privacy settings and provides detailed analysis of your exposure, along with links to the Privacy Settings page on which you can make adjustments for a particular score.
If you know of other useful audit tools, please let me know.
Thanks to Sarah Evans for the link to Profile Watch and to Chris Marino for the link to Reclaim Privacy.
Photo credits:
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