Zuckerberg responds to privacy concerns
washingtonpost.com
washingtonpost.com
Time to read the NYT and WSJ for the real view on how mass print media views the privacy issue. I won't waste 10 seconds reading another Post piece on Facebook.
Here are some facts that I got from this piece:
- They have heard and discussed our feedback.
- They are responding to the demand for simpler privacy controls by giving simpler privacy controls.
- They are giving an easy way to opt out of ALL third party services.
Of course...that's my imagination...it runs wild.
the worst part is the end when he subtly tries to use the fact that it started out as a dorm room project as some sort of excuse as to why the company is having all of these problems.
Ah, so I guess all those people whose phone numbers are streaming through "Evil" or whose updates about their rectal surgery are being exposed through the Open Graph API want this information to be floating around the Web.
(tongue-in-cheek humor) I propose UNIX style privacy controls - user, group, world.
http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2007/09/the_multics_op... (read the linked PDF; linking to Bruce as sort of "peer review" and "don't take my word for it")
Like simplicity, defaults are hugely important in UI design. But Zuckerberg appears to be carefully avoiding the subject.
What has people angry isn't that the privacy settings are complex; it's that Facebook has essentially used the increasing complexity to pull a bait and switch with their privacy of the past few years.
Surely it's best to communicate with your customers directly, y'know, with a Facebook message or something?
Looking at blog.facebook.com right now, there is no sign of this, nothing officially on facebook.com. This is why people don't trust Facebook.
I'm still happy to give FB a break over this; they've done a lot to improve privacy in recent months and IMO get credit for that. I'm still having a hard time verifying the vast majority of "privacy violations" people seem to be finding; I suspect they don't really exist in the way they are presented. Obviously there are one or two that are a problem (and I hope they address that) such as the information that can no longer be hidden from search.
I've been playing the Facebook privacy game for a long time - and from that perspective most of this current reporting/outrage is either a) people getting on a bandwagon/following the crowd or b) misinformed. Amongst that the smattering of genuine complaints has mostly been lost to the noise. In a few months it will be back to a few of us pressing those issues again....
Bottom line is; the problem is in creating effective controls people understand. They really need to crack that, and if that is what the current fad achieves then great.
They've sucked since day one, they make it steadily worse, but after all, it's no big deal because my facebook page is mostly empty, it's just a shingle to help people find me if they're looking for me (it's not like the whole world reads HN :) ).
Facebook could do a lot better in this respect, and they should default new features to 'off' if their users check a single box, once that says 'default new features to 'off''.
That should do it.
After that they can do a one time announcement of that one checkbox and anybody that doesn't check it will have nothing to complain in 6 months when they roll out new features that affect your privacy somehow.
And they should stop the double speak just say it like it is, we're not stupid.
Yes, that would be the #1 best fix to be honest.
How about a simple radio button: [] Share my information with 3rd parties [] Do not share my information with 3rd parties
Put it right at the end there as an override in case we can't understand some of your more complex settings.
Um... no, the biggest message you have heard recently is that people don't want you destroying the terms of service they agreed to with unilateral, opt-out changes, you greedy tool.
"If people share more, the world will become more open and connected. And a world that's more open and connected is a better world. These are still our core principles today."
In other words, Zuck is bent on setting your personal information free so that "people share more".
That "response" doesn't make me feel so warm and fuzzy.
"If we give people control over what they share, they will want to share more."
I read that as saying that if people have control over who sees their information, they will become more comfortable with sharing more widely over time. You may not agree with that sentence, but it conflicts with your conclusion.
-- You have control over how your information is shared.
-- We do not share your personal information with people or services you don't want.
-- We do not give advertisers access to your personal information.
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Ahahahahahahahahahahahahah. This is why Queerty and Pandora silently installed applications on my profile and had access to my data without me opting into anything (I've never used Connect or anything like it). Or why Instant Personalization was turned on automatically.
You pissed off a population of users, arguably who are tuned-into this discussion and many of which are technical enough to call you on your BS. The candy coated, lets see how little we can get away with, isn't going to work. In fact, it's only going to make things work.
If the new settings are good, good. Maybe they will avert some of the mistrust that many view towards them. I certainly won't forget the shit that went down on my profile w/o my permission in the last 2 months. Maybe an apology, an admission of a bad idea, etc would be more convincing.
At least Google had the stones to say, rather quickly, Oops, sorry, we shouldn't have done that.
Apart from all the personal information that Facebook doesn't allow you to hide from non-friends, non-Facebook members, and search engines.
That said, I still consider the initial "outing" of fan pages to be a huge breach of trust.
Then there's the "This information, such as your Pages and list of friends, is still public, so it could appear elsewhere on the site and be accessed by applications you and your friends use" note on top of the Friends, Tags and Connections privacy page, which doesn't seem to be true at the moment, but which is very unnerving nonetheless. I consider my friend list on Facebook to be personal information.
Most ads that you submit get rejected on sight, but if you post the same exacting thing at another type of day it gets through.
Mainly their ad platform is surviving because the sheer volume of impressions they can serve is hard to ignore. Other than that, they damn sure aren't making it easy for advertisers to give them money.
There is no way for an app to install on your profile without your permission, it's just not in the API and I see no reason why Facebook would give them access to a secret API. Are you sure you didn't sign in to Pandora with your Facebook account? This is a pretty serious accusation. I'm no facebook fan but we need to be honest in our criticism if we want to be credible.
In this case, there was a bug that was showing applications on a user’s Application Settings page that the user hadn’t authorized. No information was shared with those applications and the user’s list of applications was not shown to anyone but the user. This bug has been fixed.
It does appear that unauthorized apps are no longer being added to users' pages, however any unwanted applications that were previously added will still need to be removed manually."
http://www.macworld.com/article/151087/2010/05/facebook_addi...
It may have been a bug, and it may be different now, but there was certainly a period of time that apps could add themselves without my explicit permission.
There was the blue Facebook bar on top saying that Pandora is connected with my Facebook. I could click no to disable it.
There is a special service that Pandora, yelp and a few others are using. It is on by default and opt-out.
Not very private if you ask me.
How I understand the concept of the like button is this:
The like button is an extremely easy version of Facebook connect. When you are logged into Facebook and visit a site with the like button implementation, you have automatically logged in. You do not need to click the like button. (Remember you could once sign in automatically to TechCrunch's commenting system by just visiting).
This way Facebook can monitor the sites you visit and in future can serve you better ads on those websites than Google. (that is how they are a major Google competitor.
The so called apps that were installed without permission was was just a internal tracking tool that was made public. It still exsits but users just don't see it any more.
Trust me, when I opened Pandora and saw "Kyle Blahblah" likes the same music as you, I was furious. Which is when I found out I now had apps on my profile I had never approved.
The only app I ever wanted on my Facebook was Twitter, and oh boy, did I have more than that. Trust me, I know what I'm doing and I know that I can say with 100% confidence that I did NOT agree to install those apps. I understand how hard is is for me to convey my sincerity, but I know full well how an app is supposed to be presented for access to my profile, and that never happened.
edit Just checked Pandora. It definitely is piggy backing on Instant Personalization which is now turned off. Apparently Pandora even kindly gives one a way of shutting it off while still on a Pandora.com page which is nice. I must have missed that in my rage to go shut it off in my Facebook profile.
Actually, the ONLY reason I even knew it grabbed the info from Facebook was by the profile picture they automatically used, and would not let you change or delete.