There has been a lot of news lately about Facebook and their privacy problems. Most of the reports, articles, etc have been in locations that only techies read. But it is starting to go mainstream. When you have a well known tech journalist announcing that he (Leo Laporte) is quitting Facebook on a national radio show, it shows that there is some growing momentum.
Leo stated his reasons for quitting Facebook as:
- the privacy settings are too difficult for him to figure out, so how would a “normal, not technical” user be able to
- Facebook originally had a contract with its users that everything is private, now they are making everything public by default, and
- as a public personality, he felt that to have a Facebook fan page was a tacit endorsement of Facebook and would mislead his audience, some of who are not technical (Leo has a national radio show where people call in for help with computers, etc. It is called The Tech Guy).
As an experiment, I logged into my oldest son’s Facebook page to tweak the privacy settings. Since he does not get on the computer much, I have gmail set up to get his email. After the third “friend” request that was a woman who had their profile picture of them wearing only underwear and all their wall posts were links to “the pictures I took of myself last night,” I decided that something had to give. So I logged into his account and changed the privacy settings.
Facebook’s privacy settings can be a bit daunting. A lot of the settings are defaulted to “Everyone,” which means that everyone can see that information even if they don’t have a Facebook page. Another setting defaults to making all your information searchable by Google and other search engines. I think one of the problems I was having with my son’s account is he put his birth year in wrong (had to, Facebook doesn’t allow 11 year olds to sign up. So he added 10 years to his birth year. Unfortunately that means Facebook thinks he is a 21yo male ). I changed his birth year so that it appears he is 13yo.
I am not going into all the settings I changed. Suffice it to say that most settings are either “only me” or “friends only.” Even changing the settings to “only me” was a challenge, as it was hidden behind the “Customize” menu option.
What I believe Facebook should do is change their privacy settings to a simple slider (sort of like the Privacy tab on Internet Explorer’s Internet Options panel. It should have a reasonable default that doesn’t make too much information public. Then there should be an Advanced button so that users can tweak their settings as desired. And most important, once they pick a default, they have to make a corporate decision (and publish it) that the default privacy can only be changed by them to more private. What I mean is that if they decide to change the default privacy, they will only change to more private, never to more public. If they think their users would be better served by one of the settings being made more public, they need to make that case. And the case they present should be compelling enough that the users would make the choice to change the setting. The only way the privacy settings can be moved to more public should be by the users, not the system.
Changing the privacy settings like this should solve the complaints about Facebook’s privacy settings being too complex and difficult to figure out. I think that to start out, there should be four choices:
- Paranoid (just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they aren’t after you 🙂 )
- Worried (make the default for under 18yo)
- Normal (default)
- Public personality
Then put a link or button for advanced settings. Believe me, 90% or more of the users will never click the button. Or they won’t once Facebook earns back the user’s trust that they have squandered.
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