This morning Facebook is holding a conference call/web share for press outlining changes the site is making to its privacy options. Facebook hasn’t given us much of a heads up as to exactly what they’ll be changing, but there’s a good chance it will have something to do with the ‘Everyone’ sharing settings the site has recently been toying around with, which takes the social network one step closer to mimicking Twitter’s functionality. There’s also a chance Facebook will be overhauling its convoluted privacy control pages. The call begins at 10 AM PST.
- Here to discuss latest privacy settings on Facebook. Rolling out some tests in the following week. Here to brief us are Chief Privacy Officer Chris Kelly and Leah Pearlman
- Facebook’s mission is to give people the power to share. Privacy controls enhance this mission.
- Facebook is acknowledging how its current privacy settings have become confusing.
- When people can control who can see their content, they share more meaningfully.
- The publisher privacy control that’s currently in testing is proving quite effective. Anyone anyone wants to share with the public can share more broadly.
- Facebook is removing regional networks. Initially when Facebook started, networks were the ‘bedrock’ of privacy. When they extended beyond colleges/work networks, they opened up regional networks. These generated a lot of confusion. Fragmented the user experience, some networks were far larger than others (SF vs. Australia). 50% of users aren’t in a regional network.
- Facebook is launching new simple settings. FINALLY.
- Anywhere people set privacy on the site, they’ll be able to choose from the same sets of options. There will be a consistent set of options: Share with ‘Everyone’. Can share with ‘Friends and Networks’. Share with ‘Friends of Friends’ (FB says it’s good for photos, restaurant recommendations,etc ). “Share With Friends”. And finally, “Customize”, which lets you specify who can see a certain item.
- Consolidating six different privacy pages into one simple privacy page. There’s a little question mark next to every item so you can see what the section pertains to.
- Third part of these changes are the way people connect. Balancing way people access information with their desire to connect. Now testing ways to opt-in to these new settings.
- The Transition Tool: Facebook wants everyone to know what’s going on, so people understand. Explain to people that if they open key pieces of information, it can make the experience “richer”. Three options people can select for in this Transition tool (there are six different transition tools in testing internally, they’re not sure what the final one will be).
- Transition Tool 2: Users can be usually placed in two categories — one that likes to use granular privacy settings, and another that does more broad settings. This allows them to perform these broad privacy settings.
- The Transition tool is a “Powerful opt-in” to make changes that lets users change how they’d like their privacy settings to default (whether it be public or private).
Q: It seems you’re encouraging people to share more information with everyone. Is that the case?
A(Schrage): Trying to manage the digital tension between sharing and privacy. People should be as open or closed as they want to be. We think we can accommodate that.
A2 (Pearlman): Many people who sign in to Facebook, it’s tough for people to disambiguate themselves when they have the same name. We’re encouraging people to be more open in some cases.Q: It sounds like things shared by everyone will be indexable by major search engines, right?
A (Pearlman): It’s certainly something that we’re talking about. But it’s not like that at this time.
A2 (Schrage): We want people to be sensitive to this sharing, so we’re defining it in the broadest sense, so people in the test experience it before we make these changes (with the search engines).Q: How are you going to educate people about the impact of sharing with ‘everyone’?
A(Schrage): We think one of the reasons people don’t use settings is that they’re not simple enough, so we’ve spent a lot of time talking with users about making these more simple. And making these changes in real time as they are publishing.
A2 (Pearlman): When people decide to publish to everyone by default the first time they do it, a dialog will pop up warning them. Trying to catch people when they’re actually about to post.Q:Friend of mine is a therapist, some of clients are popping up in ‘people you may know’, which she thought was creepy. Also, you comment on advertisers, wondering how this will play into open stream initiative.
A (Schrage): Because someone pops up in people you may know, doesn’t mean any information is shared, often results from contact importer. Doesn’t mean there’s that actual connection, just hit the ‘x’ to erase it. With regard to the streams, Facebook isn’t changing anything about the way we share data with advertisers (we don’t share it without user permission).
Q: How are Facebook ad settings for local businesses that may have used regional networks to target their ads?
A: We’re going to be mapping current regional network information, move to current city. So they may not be in the network, but they can look at their current city. Also have previously used other methods like IP targeting to ensure that ads are delivered more effectively.Q: When you roll out the transition tools, will there be one for everyone, or will they be assigned by the bucket a user is in?
A: We’re going to initially be testing six of them, will probably settle on two different designs that will roll out to everyone. Overall committed to help users reflect settings they have already chosen.Q: What will now be public by default?
A: Historically users have always had control over how they connect and share information. Only can see name and profile picture unless you share more than that.
Happy Birthday, Jason. Glad you’re takin’ the day off
Doesn’t 10AM Facebook Privacy call scream birthday party?
I’m sure you guys are already eating cake.
We actually have donuts at the office today
I hope someone had the audacity to order glazed sour cream, the best donut there is.
What is the conference call number?
Just a reminder: Anonymity is the best privacy policy.
They know what they’re doing.
It’s going to be very interesting to see how they develop over the next year. A lot of people have been incorrectly suggesting they’re taking on Twitter; I think it’s much, much bigger than that.
The WebEx iPhone client is fun since participants see your device name.
I’ve joined a lot of WebEx conferences as “pickle” lately.
friends of friends…friends of friends of friends…friends of friends of friends of friends…ergo…Everyone!
Facebook stopped being fun when it became a human directory.
You just know that this is going to go horribly, horribly wrong…
I don’t mind Facebook making changes, but I really wish they’d stop trying to be Twitter. It’s not a battle they can win, and when Twitter goes out of style, it’ll just end up taking Facebook with it.
Faceboook’s great for sharing things with real friends and family. Twitter’s great for sharing things with the world and finding new friends. If they stuck to what they were good at, people would use both. But FB want people to make a choice… so they both end up losing out.
I think the main question is WHEN will they have RSS/Atom for public/everyone content.
If I’m publishing content for everyone to consume, I want an feed of this public, and available for Google (and everyone else) to index.
wow, for a company that is this in debt, they sure take themselves WAY to seriously.
USENET had a lifecycle of what…5-10 years?
Any “platform” has a lifecycle, considering mainstream internet has only be around for less then 15 years, and we have already seen major communications platforms (USENET/BBS–>IRC–>ICQ–>AOL CHAT–>AOL INSTANT MESSENGER–>GEOCITIES–>FRIENDSTER–>MYSPACE–>FACEBOOK-?>Twitter)
They need to stop investing so much into this platform and more into R&D for what the next platform will be, otherwise when the next platform does arrive (whatever it is, i still think we never needed to go beyond USENET for our social networking as i don’t see what more facebook has to offer) facebook regardless of what features it has will be gone.
good point, but that’s what divides the old and new web developers
The old web developers sees the internet for what it is, a communications PROTOCOL. And use that protocol for new and exciting things.
New web developers see the internet as only the HTTP and even more-so HTML…and use it to see how many APIs they can slop together on one page.
At least the twitter API moved beyond limiting users to the horrid world of HTML, and thus you had some fairly nice apps developed.
People need to move beyond seeing the internet as HTML web pages. there is more to it then that, but the tunnel vision of making it only in the browserverse has limited it’s possibilities.
interesting post, thanks to Jason! i need to try it ))
Facebook,
You are wasting time on this. Keep it simple, stupid. My mother, who accounts for about 40% – 50 % of your demographic, could care less about tweaking her privacy settings.
The logo seems blurred.
I think removing Regional Networks is a mistake and very likely to create a backlash.
How about the ability to disallow 3rd party apps to view your photos and other info? If I want to take a stupid f-ing “I’m a ” survey, why does the app need access to my photos?
I think instead of removing Regional Networks, they should blow that section out and stop using the regional network as any sort of security setting…add zip codes, area codes, states, counties, cities, towns and villages. Allow people to be members of as many regional networks as they want.
And they need to allow you a way to make some friends more important than others (and I don’t want to set up groups…I just want a way to say person x is important to me, person y is not)…I hate quizzes, but especially from people that are barely friends. I might read one from a close friend but the amount of noise clutters up the feeds.
i’m agree with Aron, that’s will be big mistake!