Managing Facebook: New Privacy Settings

Courtesy flickr: chant3

So, back in August, I posted a story called Managing Facebook: A World Divided to talk all about how I’d done up my privacy settings, friend lists and so on. It was a set of rules, permissions and walls that I was happy and comfortable with.

And then, Facebook went and changed them all on me.

Now, there were a few major points to their most recent privacy update:

1. All regional networks are gone. We are now one world, one Facebook.
2. The granularization (Yeah – I think I made that one up) of wall posts and other privacy settings.
3. The opening of select information to the public as a whole.

So much as I did back in August, I decided to go through the new bits piece by piece to figure out how I felt about them and how I could tweak them to my liking.

1. The destruction of regional networks

One of the things Facebook announced was that they were destroying regional networks. These networks came in pretty handy, admittedly, for some things – events, for example, or (and here’s the biggest criticism I’ve seen) trying to figure out if the ‘John Smith’ you’ve searched for is the right ‘John Smith’. You could set profiles settings (Photos, wall and so on) to anyone in your own region, which did keep the site local to some degree, too. But as a general rule – I’m glad they’re gone.

Now, this may be BECAUSE I use Facebook more on a global level than a local one – but I’ve always found the networks to be more limiting. I understand that there’s an argument to keep them to let people find you more easily – but my thoughts are that they’ve made ‘Current City’ public (See #3) and  ’Home Town’ can be set public by you (See #2) – so this issue of using it to find people is kinda moot.

2. Privacy – Piece by Piece

Here’s one that’s been confused all over the place. As a rule, they did enable MORE options here – but they also took some away (which I’ll cover in #3). Take, for example, wall posts. You can now use privacy settings to help ensure that your “Man – drank so much last night and heading in to work hungover” posts aren’t seen by your boss. Handy. Some of the profile settings have been split up, too – such as “Family & Relationship’ and ;Religious & Political Views’ so that you can set those up separately (They were bundled in the larger ‘Profile Info’ before)

As a rule… I’m mostly OK with these changes. For the most part, using the friends groups I set up once before and a small amount of tweaking, I was able to get most of this back to where it was before. I also enjoy that I have more bits and pieces to control in the privacy options than I once did on some of these.

3. It’s An Open World, After All…

And what would a Facebook privacy post be without a rant. As part of the changes to the privacy options, Facebook opened some stuff to the world and isn’t letting you change them. These are: name, profile picture, gender, current city networks (obviously non-regional), pages you’re a fan of and your friends list. They said that this information is the stuff people use to figure out if the person they’ve found IS the person they looked for (Oh, this John Smith is in my university alumni network, lives in the city my buddy moved to, looks like my buddy, likes the same brands of beer my buddy did and has a bunch of friends I recognize – that’s the guy!). I get their idea. I really do.

But I don’t understand why we can’t opt out of some of that. Specifically – the friends list. I’m fine with people seeing my name, picture and gender… But everything else SHOULD be opt-out in my opinion. I see the value in forcing it to be public – but hometown is probably more useful to some folks than current city – and I can hide that. And why should I have to reveal my ENTIRE friends list, when you’re really only looking for MUTUAL friends in the list – why not just show the mutual ones?

Not to mention, of course, that the entire point of setting these to public is to allow ‘Everyone’ to find you – but I can still use privacy options to set my search result to only appear if we’re already friends. So why, then, can’t I limit some of this other stuff to subset of friends? My boss, for example, doesn’t need to see who my mom or high school best friend is. Facebook has, since, allowed you to hide the friends list from appearing on the profile – but the information behind the scenes is still public… and it’s an all or nothing deal: I’m fine with SOME people knowing my full friends list – just not everyone.

Two Steps Forward…

Overall, I think it’s two steps in the right direction – the abolishing of regional networks and the modularization of a number of privacy settings. But it’s at least a step backwards because we’ve lost control of some info (Like our friends list). I think my wife said it best when I was chatting with her about the changes: “I feel bad for Facebook” – and I can see that compassion. With so many millions of users – they’re in a position where they can’t ever please everybody. If they gave us full, bit-by-bit control – they’d hear that it was too complex. And to have things to simple gets them a “It’s not specific enough” scream. They can’t win.

This weekend, I’ll break down my new settings on a per-friends list basis and take another look at how I’ve broken down my friends groups.