Facebook's New Privacy Settings: Too little, too late
Posted 3/19/2008 09:05:00 PM |
- 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?
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6 Comments: (Post a Comment)
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At March 20, 2008 9:39 AM,
Bertil Hatt said...
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Ok, your question is: this tool allows more control, will people be incited in sharing?
Control and incitation, let's have the economist step in:
We assume that providing information has benefits (being cool, making friends) and risks (getting stalked, indentiy theft).
On this point, you seem to be slightly contradictory: is sharing "more" information more risk or more benefit, and for who?
People used to share the information that had higher benefits for a share of their network then risk from the rest: nothing that could harm them (Facebook was not a collection of drunken tales anymore) so they were mostly minimizing irrelevance, and giving hardly any costly personal information. Facebook seems to have dragged towards a local version of digg.
Now I can post party photos -- and I won't, but my cousin will, and I'll share them, but I won't mish them with the party photos with my colleagues.
It might reduce serendipity: alumni midly interested on my work; it will improve relevancy. What would you rather have, what helped grow internet spectacularly: StumbleUpon or Google?
"Too little, too late" : I think introducing features late has the advantage of being able to rely on a campaign demanding it that helps you find the right defaults, and communicate better about it. News feed Privacy setting? Watchafujrizdat? Having a three day drama with a happy ending: poeple get out sour, but the vast majority of indifferent users know how, why and whether to use it. Too little? Same thing, it's a complex set of rules that have to be reinvented: gradual introduction is the best take. The last two crisis have proven one thing: Facebook can apologize, react and correct in a matter of days; long on Internet time or for people who update their page several pages day, flashing by anyone else's standard.
I'm happy. Could be better, will be better once it's road-tested, and I'm still working on my own remarks on Privacy with my Privacy Badges app -- but I'm happy. -
At March 20, 2008 10:24 AM,
fred said...
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As an "economist" (or one with training in economics) myself, one thing I've learned is that young people's behavior is less rational than we'd hope. So if there's a little cognitive dissonance, thats likely because there's nuance there. The rational actor model doesn't hold up as well in Facebook.
I think Facebook's end goal of increased sharing, by allowing privacy and context control, may happen. You're right on that. Some people will take advantage of this, and some people will share more as a result. No disagreement there.
The "too little, too late" argument stems from the fact this won't reverse current trends, and current trends are undeniable. Facebook is a social network where path transversal is incredibly difficult because of privacy, because all the doors are locked. In that sense it is the opposite of vibrant.
Important point here is to remember - friend lists solve the problem of sharing to certain contexts. So for people who are already private and segregated, they may share more to a subset of their friends. Friend-of-a-friend is an effort to expand the network, making to more browsable. Two different things here, but in both cases the end goal is more interesting content for more eyes. -
At March 20, 2008 10:37 AM,
Bertil Hatt said...
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What you describe, and miss on Facebook, is group-size activity, political discussion?
Beyond friend of a friend, its basically almost strangers that you identify with a handle: militant, living in such or such area, life style.
I agree this is missing -- and I thing this part should be happening on groups, at least this is what I'm seeing.
Group features are not perfect, I fully agree with that: we need the ability to comment on a group without embracing its opinion, we need to manage group visibility better then that: both hide your belonging to a public group and share with a list of friend your recent comment on a groups discussion thread. Hiding? Yes: if your position is frowned upon by a significant share of your relatives, you don't feel like entering "~ and proud". Once you have been talked into getting out of the closet (I'm using a Gay vocabulary, but this can apply to any opinion, orientation, view), then you can have a LiveJournal-like space.
In a nutshell: Facebook is too indivudalistic. A Forum app anyone? -
At March 21, 2008 12:40 PM,
leafar.eu said...
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Impossible to remenber who is who !
I'vedeleted all my friends.
Rebuild it slowly using groups i've created or we are both in.
Group is the power of facebook.
Frienship is just about access.
Nice move anyway. -
At March 22, 2008 12:42 PM,
said...
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Hey Fred.
This is very interesting. I note that facebook used to have friendster-ish Friend of a friend privacy back in the day (2005), but shifted away back to the network model.
I think that danah points about multiple contexts being the death of friendster will likely play out on facebook, but more slowly, as it takes a while to feel the pain. For me, it's just too much like hard work to classify all the people in my list, so I can be bothered, and simply won't add information.
The benefits I got from facebook are ebbing away with it's drive towards being the tool for multiple contexts. This makes me sad. I wish it had stayed university only, as I thought it was brilliant then, and had a low psychological overhead as you had a pretty good guess as who your audience was.
Declinig pageviews and increasing privacy are a real problem for facebook - my first reaction the reinstatement of the FOAF privacy was that they must have noticed the lockdown on privacy and are trying to force their way into being relevant for everyone, but life isn't like that.
Icarus syndrome. -
At March 22, 2008 12:56 PM,
Bertil Hatt said...
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After actively using it, I've the privacy update lacking: not in number of features (I was positively surprised to see that I could recommend my friends to a new friend) but in the way they are implemented; I cannot attach a context to photos by album, or to certain notes: I still have to declare that all my objects of the same type can be seen by certain type of people. Some photos, links can be innocuous, others not. Friend lists should be augmented to include those.
