SherWeb

In the four years that I’ve had a Facebook account, their system and interface has probably undergone more surgery than Carrot Top. In these few short years, I’ve had to change my privacy settings several times. I’ve had to familiarize myself with whatever new interface Facebook has decided to launch on its users. I’ve found myself, time and time again, having to adapt to their changes in order to use their services. Which is funny to me, considering that in an interview with Tech Crunch founder, Michael Arrington, and Facebook founder, Mark Zuckerberg, Zuckerberg says that Facebook is “constantly innovating and updating its system to reflect the current social norms”. To me, it seems Facebook has become one of the driving forces affecting our social norms.

(image: source)

In December 2009, shortly before the release of Hosted Exchange 2010, your name, profile picture, gender, current city, networks, Friends List, and all the pages you subscribe to, became publicly available information on Facebook. So, when I began my research for this article, I started by looking at my own privacy settings. After a little digging and clicking, I was alarmed by many of the things about me that were made public. How our information gets classified amidst Facebook’s frequent changes can often be very confusing for users and I seemed to be in the dark about my Facebook privacy.

Privacy used to be an opt-out feature on Facebook, which restricted the visibility of a user’s personal information to just their friends and their “network” (college or school). Now, privacy is opt-in, and the default privacy settings for a Facebook user’s personal information have become very permissive. Too permissive if you ask me.

Matt McKeon a developer at IBM Research’s Center for Social Software, created infographics that illustrate the evolution of Facebook privacy from 2005 until now. Just to give you a visual idea of how much Facebook’s privacy policies have vacillated within five years, I have included McKeon’s graphs for 2005 and for 2010. The concentric rings on the graphs show the groups who can see a given slice of information, if you leave the default settings in place.

2005

2010

When You Share (status updates, photos, links, videos etc..) By Default “Everyone” Can See

Carefully go through your Facebook privacy settings because your Facebook information became completely public unless you’ve specified otherwise. And they’re tricky buggers about it too. Even the “Recommended” subsection will suggest that your status, photos, posts, family and relationships, be public to EVERYONE. And by everyone, they mean family, friends, friends of friends and the whole darn Internet.

To actually check your current privacy settings, you have to click on a little, tiny blue “View Settings” link, which is casually thrown into the last sentence of the Basic Directory Information section on the Choose Your Privacy Settings page.

1. View Settings

2. Basic Directory Information Page

Once I was on the Basic Directory Information page I discovered that anyone searching me on the Internet (because by default anyone CAN search me on the Internet) can see my interests, my hometown, my education, work experience, and who my friends are. You can edit these settings as you see fit. You can also enable or disable the Public Search function by going into the Applications and Websites section of the Choose Your Privacy Settings page, clicking the tiny, little blue link that says Edit Your Settings and disabling the Public Search funciton.

1. Choose Your Privacy Settings: Applications and Websites: Edit your settings

2. Application and Websites page: Public Search

While you’re on the Applications and Websites page, you may also want to check what information about YOU is available to applications, games and websites when your friends use them. Your name, profile picture, gender, networks and user ID (along with any other information you’ve set to everyone) is available to friends’ applications unless you turn off platform applications and websites.

Back on the Choose Your Privacy Settings page, you will find another little, tiny blue link that says Customize Settings.

1. Choose Your Privacy Settings page: Customize Settings

2. Customize Settings Page

This will show you all the things you share (posts, family, relationships, birthday, religious and political views etc…), things others share (photos and videos you’re tagged in, your comments on posts, whose wall posts you can see) and your contact information (phone numbers, IM screen name, address…). I found myself again disheartened to discover that Facebook had already preset these options so that anyone can see them. You should go through each and choose whether or not you want everyone, friends of friends or friends only to have access to this information or even customize it so only you can.

PHOTO PRIVACY

You will find the option to edit your photo album privacy in the Customize Settings page. You will find the tiny, little blue Edit Album Privacy link at the bottom of the Things I Share subsection. Click on it, and you will be taken to a new page which contains your profile pictures and all your photo albums.

1. Choose Your Privacy Settings: Customize Settings page: Edit Album Privacy

At this point, I was pretty well fuming from all orifices when I saw that “Everyone” was again used as the default setting and that I had to manually change the settings so that only my friends could see my pictures. Again, I went through every album and set them so that only my friends could view them. I don’t need strangers falling upon my pictures and finding me in my Tootsie Roll costume from last Halloween.

Posting
Before you post a status update, link or anything else, you can click the lock icon to choose who can see it. You can also go into Block lists and edit your lists of blocked people and applications.

1. Choose Your Privacy Settings Page: Block Lists

2. Block Lists page

This section lets you block people from interacting with you or seeing your information on Facebook. You can also specify friends you want to ignore application invites from, and see a list of the specific applications that you’ve blocked from accessing your information and contacting you.

“The Age of Privacy is Over”

For those who want to be searched and found, those who use Facebook for marketing/business purposes, it’s ideal. For those who are using Facebook to stay in touch with family and friends, like I am, having all this personal information floating around on the World Wide Web is an eerie thought which could potentially be very dangerous. Alas, the longer I’ve been on Facebook, the more geared towards advertisers, marketers and businesses it has become. Facebook believes the future will mark an end to privacy. But is Facebook  creating that future for us?