Absurd Complexity of Facebook Privacy Settings | Hacker News Reader

Absurd Complexity of Facebook Privacy Settings

nytimes.com

36 pointsminalecs6 comments

I made a comment the other day about this being facebook's UX failure. This is a pretty damning illustration. How could they burden their users with something like this?

Nothing but a maze of twisty little passages.

I can't help but wonder whether it's complex by design so people will stick with the defaults.

The websites chosen to compare Facebook's privacy policy to are ridiculous. Facebook operates in more countries, has far more users, and has more products than any of those other websites. Of course the privacy policy will be longer. Honestly, it's pretty amazing they can keep the length at only 5x Twitter's when their product has orders of magnitude more features and services. The comparison to the constitution is silly for the reasons discussed in the other thread: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1342711

There is certainly room for improvement with the UI and organization of the controls, but that's not an easy task when so many granular controls are available. Honestly, all this Facebook privacy hysteria is getting a little out of control. There are legitimate issues, but there is also an absurdly high amount of band-wagonning and me-tooing from otherwise intelligent people.

I dunno. I'm a developer and I should know how to drive software. When I distrust the UI enough that I'm not sure if I've pinned down my privacy, then they're failing. I guarantee most of my friends don't know what they're sharing.

I think they should have "everyone / friends of friends/only friends" options as a default selection, with an advanced option if you really want to dig around. [Insert user-tested improvement here.] At the very least, you should be able to see every privacy related option on one page, not a tree of pages.

Also, when they add extra 'features', FB should stop switching new privacy settings to the least secure options! It's like whack-a-mole - you have to check them every so often just to see what Zuck has come up with while you weren't looking.

I also think they should add a principle to their privacy approach: "surprise the user as little as possible". While this isn't easily attainable, it is something to strive for.

Facebook interface issues are silly. The privacy settings are made confusing deliberately. They have plenty of talented people and could fix this quickly if they would want to. IMO the root problem is not interface design.

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