Facebook’s privacy conference call just ended, and it’s clear some major changes are going to be coming to the social network soon. Some of these, like a totally revamped privacy control page, are both long overdue and very welcome. But others, like the Transition Tool, seem ripe for disaster.
Facebook clearly wants its users to become more comfortable sharing their content across the web, because that’s what needs to happen if the site is going to take Twitter head-on with real-time search capabilities. Unfortunately that’s far easier said than done for the social network, which has for years trumpeted its granular privacy settings as one of its greatest assets. Now, those settings are turning into problematic obstacles.
But Facebook sees its redesigned control panel as an opportunity to invite users to start shrugging off their privacy. So it’s piggybacking the new ‘Everyone’ feature on top of the Transition Tool, which is designed to help users acclimate themselves to the new settings. Facebook is planning to test out six different versions of the Transition Tool, and will probably settle on around two different versions for its general release (apparently different tools will be shown depending on your current settings).
To get an idea of just how badly this might mess things up, one need only look at the wording for “Transition Tool 2″, which was shown to the press during the conference call (screenshot below). The tool’s heading invites users to update their privacy settings, which is fair enough given that they’re getting totally reworked. But it also says “While updating your new settings, make it easier for friends to connect with you by making a few fields visible to Everyone. Please note that Everyone means everyone on the Internet.” That may be intended as a suggestion, but it sure sounds like more of a command. And you can be sure that the millions of Facebook users who have no idea what the implications are of sharing their personal data with Google and the world will be happy to tick off those “Everyone” radio buttons.
And that’s my real problem with all of this. Facebook has allowed users to share some of their information with ‘Everyone’ for a few months now, but those options have been nestled under Facebook’s privacy settings (most people probably didn’t even know it was there). Now these users are going to be seeing invitations front-and-center to share with everyone, and Facebook is telling them that this will somehow make it easier to connect with friends. Perhaps Facebook is confident that its users are smart enough to realize that sharing those drunken party photos with the world is a bad idea, but I’m not.
Many of Facebook’s users are still in high school. Some are even younger than that (it isn’t hard to lie about your age on the Internet). And many of these people simply don’t understand that Google is forever. Just look at Facebook’s Vanity URLs for proof: Facebook made it very clear that these are permanent, which means that you’re going to be stuck with the same username five or ten years down the line. Yet there are still countless users grabbing names like ‘drunkdude’. That’s going to look great when your boss tries to add you as a friend.
Fortunately Facebook seems to be preparing itself for the worst. During the call, VP Communications Elliot Schrage noted that while Facebook is using a broad definition for “Everyone” right now — meaning the entire Internet — it isn’t going to actually start sharing the data with search engines immediately. Rather, it sounds like Facebook is going to keep these posts contained inside the social network at first, just in case users start over-sharing with reckless abandon (which they probably will).
In any case, Facebook is going to achieve its biggest goals with these updates: people will soon be sharing far more with the web than they were previously, and the social network will be able to mount a substantial challenge against Twitter. Of course, this isn’t the way Facebook is positioning the changes. One of my favorite parts of the conference call was when ReadWriteWeb’s Marshall Kirkpatrick noted that Facebook was clearly looking to encourage users to open up their data to the public and asked for the social network’s motivations. Facebook’s response? It wants people to make their data public because it helps disambiguate users with similar names. My phone was muted at the time, but I was laughing heartily.
I think I am probably the only person to think twitter sucks. My mother even has a twitter account…
And: Your mother plus your grandmothers have a Facebook account.
Good luck with that.
I have to agree, twitter is really lame. I prefer my communication to be anonymous: http://www.anonboard.com for example is instant just like twitter, but without any censorship or rules so people can say what they really feel.
Also you can use anonymous Twitter via AAfter Search .
Just type t? in the search box.
Please ban this anonboard spam.
Twitter killed Jeff Goldblum
Then Jeff Goldblum gave his own eulogy on the Colbert Report. In the end, it’s great source material!
In any case if you are sharing something with FB it can (and it WILL) share it with whoever pays the price for it. What I’m saying is: sooner or later they will be selling user data, that’s the only merchandise they have, period.
Well, they do also have a LOT of ad space, and while I don’t know how much money they make off of this or if it’s profitable, from an end user’s point of view they have the best ad space. With their ads targeted at my interests and my location, I’ve clicked on more ads there than the rest of the web combined.
Really? What did you BUY?
The ads on FB are so spammy, stupid and annoying that I’m wondering where did they get these ‘advertisers’.
While I do have some sympathy for the younger fbook generation not realizing how unsmart it is to slather every single dumb thing they do all over facebook, I also think people need to take the “ZOMG FACEBOOK PRIVACY UPDATES” thing down a notch or two. I’m sorry, but when you slap stuff up on the internet, you can’t also freak out that it’s not “private”. That’s why it’s called “the internet” and not “the back of your sock drawer”.
As for all those poor kids who have created these giant destined-to-be-horrifyingly-embarrassing facebook profiles, don’t forget they can always completely abandon those profiles and set up shiny new ones, sans the GR8EST KEGSTANDS EVAR! photo album
I disagree with the premise that “that’s what needs to happen if the site is going to take Twitter head-on with real-time search capabilities.”
If we have learned *anything* from the past 10 years online, it’s that most people are perfectly happy being just consumers of information instead of producers.
Many new people on Twitter just want to follow Oprah and CNN, and that’s fine.
And another thing…
Where this will bite users the most is when a friend posts a pic of you drunk and “accidentally” makes it viewable to Everyone.
doesn’t untagging solve the majority of the risk with this?
No, because in order to untag yourself means that you were initially tagged… which means the photo was visible to “everyone” (even if for a short time).
Which means it will be archived forever. http://www.archive.org.
Enabling content to be public makes it search-able, possibly bringing more traffic to Facebook. What I would like to know if they are enforcing the policy on all objects, so that users don’t inadvertently share data publicly like I did with my “special” wedding photos.
Are they going to be abandoning their gimped “email address as an image” idea, or are they still clinging to it as a “privacy” issue?
Twitter should/will sell in the next 6month. they can NEVER survive this…..
really?
Mikey, we should be able to edit comments, at least for a few secs.
I meant 6 months …with an ’s’
Trying the emulate Twitter might become the downfall of Facebook.
Dubbs –
You aren’t the only one. Twitter does suck. And it seems like Facebook is starting to go downhill. They should be trying to innovate and come up with new features for their current users, not just copy Twitter’s features.
Facebook is stating on the page that Everyone=the whole internet. Consumers need to take some responsibility and read. If you don’t want everyone to see things on your Facebook page then don’t click the everyone button. Pretty simple.
It really is a pity that this is coming into retrospect. For a society so drowned in fun and good times, drunken party photos on the internet wouldn’t seem so bad.
Funny thing is, they really do destroy lives. I know countless kids of my sons that have gotten suspended or kicked out of college because of them.
Tom Lopy
It seems like Facebook is getting desperate and trying to do too many things at the same time. There’s no need for it to be threatened by Twitter.
I think this has everything to do with monetizing their user base as rapidly as possible – be it by selling access to their user base via search products and/or via advertising/promotional opportunities. The pressure on them to start generating meaningful revenue has got to be intense.
Now, Twitter is clearly putting on the pressure on them on the real-time search side of things. That’s what has to be behind all of FB’s recent moves to become more Twitter like.
But trying to outrace Twitter to be the leader in real-time search will IMO dilute the underlying Facebook offering to such an extent that they’ll be vulnerable to a well-structured FB-Lite offering in the near future.
At their cores, Facebook is a place, Twitter is plumbing.
great line jeff. i reblogged it at fredwilson.vc
Thanks Fred!
BTW, its very similar to a tweet that I put out last week on @socialmedia411:
“Here’s the deal; Facebook is a place, Twitter is a pipe. And god knows it’s hard to get off the pipe
”
Talk soon.
Oh boy…so there is really NO good community left where I can share my intimate life details with my friends without letting the world know?
Sounds to me like a terrific business opportunity
Yeah its called e-mail, chief. You post your content on a public site don’t be surprised if unintended eyes see it. Intimate life details don’t belong on Facebook.
And if your new private-sharing site grew huge, you’d need to show revenue, just like Facebook, and you’d be looking to monetize your user’s data, just like Facebook.
Jason, other obligations prevented me from writing a very similar post before you wrote this one, but I’m glad I was able to provide the punch line for your analysis.
I’m glad you laughed, I’ve been shaking my head. It was pretty funny though, wasn’t it?
Oh, I was doing some head shaking too. One of the weirder explanations I’ve heard in a while.
Hmm, it makes sense to me that the more info one shares, the easier it would be for someone to distinguish between 3 people (or more) with the same name (i.e. same name+same interests+same location = odd). However, it is slightly disingenuous not to acknowledge that Twitter’s existence is forcing FB to make decisions it otherwise wouldn’t.
As I commented, or tried to, on a post (RE: “MySpace, Facebook, what’s next?” or something)by Kirkpatrick ,(that he would not authorize for publication, presumably b/c it was critical of his analysis or I’m banned from RWW?) Facebook is not solving a problem other than discovery since one could build something Boxee-like+P2P, but for a person’s social interactions, on a Pentium IV-based PC (people are throwing lots of these away) that could handle the web traffic of the average person (e.g. ~150 friends). P2P, or point-to-point w/ centralized set-up (ala SIP), makes more sense than ever with the average bandwidth a user has these days.
P.S.Good to know there is a rapport between you two, as there should be (even though I’m boycotting RWW until my feelings heal *pouts*
It really could be bound for disaster if they don’t provide the right hints or suggestions for users.
Eg, if you’re making your whole profile public, Facebook should be cautioning you not to publicize your address/phone number/email address, etc.
On the other hand, though, users may just approach it with the same mentality as they did MySpace private profiles, realizing that “public” means “people besides their friends/people they know can see it” and act accordingly.
Debating “privacy” online is a bit of an oxymoron. They should ask users to set parameters for more or less privacy but not allow for the illusion of full privacy.
Seeing how they handled the situation with me and http://www.tweexchange.com I cannot say that the guys are sue happy. They seem reasonable
seems you’re lost
Why on earth is Facebook giving so much credibility to Twitter. This makes no sense. They are so much larger than Twitter and by trying to constantly become like them (which most of their users do not want) that they will end up really loosing out. They are making it easier for people to take away marketshare because they are leaving their core set of users.
I don’t believe facebook wants to go after twitter.
If they wanted to, all they have to do is allow people to have a separate public page that non-friends can see, and allow people to use that profile on Connect sites (so for example this post could be signed by my company’s facebook page)
people who are on facebook share too much private information, there is no way more than 1% will compromise their privacy and turn themselves to marketing clowns
Good focus group
I’m sure Facebook is watching what we all say for early reactions that is. I would hope they make it very clear what “everyone” means, given the consequences. Ultimately though, it is the user’s responsibility to moderate what they share with the Internet.
This effectively ends any reason to be on Facebook.
You are one of those people who reads CNN and believes everything they hear… wake up.. nothing is changing except you have the option to go public as you always have.. this is a hot button topic.. great way to get web hits.. no real news here.. so what if facebook says to users go public.. the vanity URL was an obvious prelude to this. It doesn’t mean you have to.. so basically you said you were leaving facebook because they just made it easier to do what you could always do?
Truth is Facebook is silly to worry about twitter.. People like having a private place to do things. I don’t want to share things from fb like I do twitter because it means sharing my feed which has my friends in it.. and I don’t think they would like that..
sorry – there are obvious dealings with both yahoo and google already. the ‘people you might know’ function has proven this to me. a friend of mine logged into a yahoo account he hadn’t logged into in ages. this email had no connection with facebook or any other social network at all. it was a very old obscure account for specific people at one time. then never used. he logged in, suddenly 6 people show up ‘as people you might know’ whose only connection to my friend was this very private yahoo email account.
ok – yes, yahoo email accounts / profiles are not private. but these people had no connection to my friend other than this account, and their appearance in the ‘list’ seemed to be triggered solely by logging into the yahoo account. can someone explain this? there was no career connection, no education, no geographic connection, no mutual friends on any social network no anything in common other than this very obscure yahoo account. what exactly happened here?
I’ll second this too. I had a friend on Orkut a couple of years back. I then deleted that profile and never contacted him again, except for a single email (at gmail) about 2 years back.
Then bam, today, he shows up in my “suggested friends” list. None of my existing friends know this guy (he’s from a completely different city), nor have I ever visited his profile. How the hell did Facebook come to know that I was once friends with him for a one month period on another social networking site 2 years ago?
There’s definitely something either extremely fishy (private data being shared), or some of the smartest algorithms out there.
I have been reading through their privacy policy, and it’s actually really fascinating. Google and Yahoo are mentioned by name, but of course ‘neither facebook nor any developer has access to your personal data’ – except when they actually DO. It’s in there. They say that certain triggers on third party sites might ‘enhance the social whateverthehell’ – basically it sounds like if you do anything on any third party site that facebook has a ‘partnership’ with (and it looks like there aren’t many they don’t) that “trigger” could basically spawn an automated data exchange between parties. the way it’s written – they can do this. i am actually interested in hearing an alternative explanation for how this occurred just from a technical standpoint. If they legitimately were able to make this impossible connection without a blatant sharing of data with Yahoo, I would be very impressed.
I dug into the developer API, but i’m just a hack programmer, so I don’t truly understand just what it’s capable of. I’m hearing more stories like this about ‘friends you might know’, and if there is data sharing going on between the big internet companies, that has to be spelled out. if not, man – i really want to know how they did that.
Puranjay: Because this guy couldn’t have added his gmail contacts where you would have appeared?
That is the problem with this FB privacy settings change. Not simply that people can choose to make their info public, but they can share data about you (i.e. pics) even though you’ve not elected to do so, via other mediums (i.e gmail).
It’s actually worse than that. I signed up a new account with one of my other email aliases. I added no friends. The next time I logged in, it started giving me friend suggestions. How is this possible? I told Facebook NOTHING, I know no one, and it’s suggesting people that I should know.
The suggestions were all friends of my main account. When I had Facebook scan my gmail addresses in the main account a long time ago, they obviously kept a copy. When my alias signed out, it noted that we were related and started recommending friends of my main account based on that latent “relationship”.
it’s certainly effective, but pretty evil I think. I believe they offer a setting to flush that data now when it scans your gmail address book, but i have no idea where to access it for previously scanned material.
With the way they treat privacy, there will be some backlash. Not from the 22 year old college kid, but definitely from the older users. College kids don’t care about privacy that much – heck, you’re usually sharing a dorm room with another guy, so there’s no privacy in their real life to begin with. But the older people on facebook, the ones with children and wives, they can be pretty protective of their privacy. I don’t think they would enjoy what Facebook is doing with all their info.
As long as they are not re-scanning your contacts, I don’t see a problem with storing the first copy that you authorize them to fetch.
I think many of these stories of people popping up as new friend suggestions are simply old email contacts that are just now signing up to Facebook. Facebook sees them in your cached copy of a contact list and now adds them as a suggestion.
I’m still of the opinion that 99% of people use Facebook because they want to share stuff *privately* – i.e. amongst friends and family only.
Encouraging people to be more public is entirely the wrong thing to do and is something that’s only going to end up killing their major USP.
It’s either going to result in another big Facebook backtrack, or it’s the beginning of the end for them.
check out your privacy settings on facebook. i was pretty amazed at just how ‘open’ my information was not just on facebook, but third party sites. it’s all set to be the as open as possible by default.
man, just from a marketing perspective, imagine the integration of your entire history google, yahoo, microsoft, aol, facebook and whoever else. they could go back years. one ancient email could connect to a username on some old defunct service no longer even around, but also be the same username you may have used in yahoo or google’s early days – and you more than likely don’t remember. from there, the data mining algorithms start whipping up profiles and it wouldn’t much more to have a complete history on you – talk about behavioral marketing. yeah – user12345 used to post on usenet in 1996 about a medical problem – here is a list of every search he’s done since then, all his profiles, emails, relationships up to 3:00pm today. remember when choicepoint was the scary monster with all your data belong to them? these aren’t even public databases.
by the way, while my brain just ventured off crazy land (4 days of programming with no sleep) – I just remembered Inktomi was the search technology used by the CIA-backed, private venture capital firm In-Q-Tel.
“April 24, 2002
Foster City, CA
Inktomi Corp. (Nasdaq: INKT), developer of scalable network infrastructure software, today announced that In-Q-Tel, a technology venture funded by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), has selected Inktomi search technology to deliver customized information retrieval to streamline the gathering of data.”
Inktomi…. inktomi… who were they again? oh yeah. Yahoo’s search engine. They also sold google the company that would become google earth i believe. the more of their older press releases i read, the more weird stuff you see. but i’m sure the CIA has only benevolent intentions with all these investments in companies like “callminer”.
ok… sorry. 4 days without sleep turns my brain into a something like a book of madlibs co-authored by by r crumb, that sham-wow dude and that one radio guy who is always screaming about the illuminati. but what if…didn’t they just get totally busted sitting inside AT&T recording everything that tweeted and twitted across the copperwires and radio waves that we all use to … uh… like do everything?
facebook.com/drunkdude probably just got 1,000 friend requests
Maybe not every social network needs to become a second twitter. What if FB has got it wrong and it’s current success is based on the fact that information can primarily be share privately.
Trying to be all things for all people has always been a bad idea – curious to see how this one turns out.
“Facebook’s response? It wants people to make their data public because it helps disambiguate users with similar names. My phone was muted at the time, but I was laughing heartily.”
Maybe you aren’t too familiar with the challenges of semantic search, but name disambiguation is a huge one. Having more public data associated with a name is a goldmine, to be effective you really need less than 35% of the name space to be augmented, and the vast majority of the general populations’ online presence is on Facebook/MySpace. Laugh if you want, but I think that’s being naive as to one of Facebook’s great opportunities to utilize the network.
i don’t know why everyone got such a stiffy when someone busted into Berkeley’s database (did anyone get fired for that by the way?). Isn’t Google also in the business of storing your medical records? hahahaha. Man, this is getting hilarious.
Oh, I’m sure this well be helpful with that. But I don’t think Facebook is being totally honest about their motivations, either.
Help meeee! Help! I logged into TechCrunch just once using Facebook and now I’m logged in forever.ver..er…er
I was/is convenient. But now I feel like I’m being stalked.
Logout of Facebook and the link will be broken.
If I was facebook, I will show this message only to 18+ people for now (just the message, settings will be available to everybody). See how things go and maybe in future make the call on below 18.
I still dont understand why facebook feels it needs to compete with twitter.
Facebook has received $716M in funding. Who is confident that they will be able to monetize their users enough to break even?
This is going to exascerbate the social engineering hacking possibilities already inherent in Facebook – you wonder when the inevitable pushback will come – if it hasn’t already.
Thanks for the article. Like Gary Vaynerchuk said here already: Facebook suck at telling their story!
Facebook wants to be Twitter. Myspace wants to be Facebook. Friendster wants to be Myspace.
Uh…I guess that about ends it.
I live in South Korea and it has become clear that Korean police are using facebook to find people doing things that aren’t necessarily illegal, but unseemly. It has been used to paint foreign teachers in a bad light and such. There is more on this story on a blog called The Marmot’s Hole.
No link?
How come I can’t download a song, but Facebook can just rip off Twitter. So if I know a bit of Dreamweaver can i make my own Myfacester.com
Honestly.. privacy on the internet will never be cut and dry. The simple answer to this is NOT to use Facebook. Don’t sign up. Don’t click “I agree” to the Terms of Service & Privacy Policy. Honestly, it’s not that difficult, people…
This whole privacy thing could be solved in the browser couldn’t it. Hit Ctrl W or some other combo and firefox takes a peak at the code/robot.text etc & shows you a visual graph of where your content might end up. It already asks me if I am sure if I want to open that active x link…why can’t it ask me if I am sure if I want to post that comment/pic?
ala “It appears you are trying to upload a pic to the internet. Uploading disparinging photos or comments may negatively affect your reputation. Do you still wish to upload this photo?”
This is a temporary problem, children that grew up on the internet don’t have these privacy boundary’s it will be up to us with the boundaries to accept there indiscretions or get passed by.
Seriously, can we get over trying to project our twentieth century view of privacy onto the implications in 2020 or 2030 of what teenagers do now?
I am reminded of the security agency who advised a manager that there was a problem with the security clearance for a person. When asked why they said it was because he was a homosexual. The manager couldn’t understand that. The spooks went on to explain that the person would be at risk of being blackmailed. The manger pointed out that the guy couldn’t be blackmailed for being a homosexual if we already knew he was. And this was the early 1990s.
Lt’s just think it through – every kid has put stuff on facebook, much of it unwisely. The people at risk in the future will be those shown to be so uncoll as to NOT have something embarrassing on Facebook.
just in case users start over-sharing with reckless abandon
I was upset when Friendster.com became a ghost town of abandoned profiles. I was not so happy with the public nature of Myspace, so Facebook became the best alternative. It was only within the last year that many of my early-thirty something age group of friends all congregated to Facebook, some kicking and screaming and most already disillusioned with social media and it’s fickle/ nomadic like trends. I had 380 friends on Friendster and have about that many on Facebook. I don’t want to have to spend another year re-finding my friends on some other flimsy vulnerable site. Unfortunately, I may have to if others leave Facebook in droves. On behalf of Generation X I protest public profiles. Just stay the same. Be a rock for society!!
This is the least of my concerns with privacy on Facebook. I’d like to know how they’re connecting me to people that they would have no knowledge of any existing or previous relationship (like the person who lived below me for three months). I have only given Facebook minimal information (no employment history, etc) Also I’d like to know why my FB news feed has failed to work properly for several weeks and yet I can’t get in touch with support to resolve the issue. Face it, Facebook has jumped the shark just like Myspace. FB can no longer handle the volume it has and it lost any pretense of caring about users (and it barely had a pretense). As the BOL podcast predicted, FB’s day in the sun is done and now we all start jumping ship.
me thinks it will make it easier for stalkers to see what you’re up to.
when people start hitting everyone thinking ‘everyone on my friends list’
(rubbing hands and sitting patiently)
Davis Havyatt – I hardly think keeping your nose clean is cyberspace and not uploading daft pictures of yourself would be considered uncool in the future. In the future the last man standing on earth who dosn’t have a social network will hold all the cards. He’ll be invisible, he can google you or me and find out everything but we won’t be able to know anything about him.
“The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was to disappear”. – Kevin Spacey in ‘The Usual Suspects’
I have been reading many sites/blogs/mails, etc. about the privacy policies issues that facebooks has been developing, most of the discuss how the company will use it for bussiness purposes, and i would like to point out another fact that i have not seen.
You see, most of you are saying that FB/Google/Yahoo/whateverthehellcompany will use the information given freely by the users. But what happens when kidnappers gangs/thughs/mafia/etc get a free look in this database?
I might sound paranoic, but in my country there have been cases in which a daughter or a son of an important bussinessman was kidnapped using the information they posted on FB, which was EVERYTHING. So, if you have think about what every teen/child? posts on facebook, think about what YOUR childern posts (if u have em)
So anyways, just my 2 cents.
P.S. Sorry for my bad, bad enlglish, havent given much practice in writing.
oh Facebook, it’s not you, it’s me.
http://onesalty...you-its-me-lol/
Facebook is starting to suck. Now, they’ve taken off Regional Networks. My friend can’t even join now. There is clearly ways you can have your profile still private when you join a region, it’s called go into your account privacy, duh!
They actually removed regional networks, read this
http://www.alis...r-you/#more-819
and join this group if you want them to bring it back
http://www.face...id=142196041935