Paul Walsh, the Irish Opportunist

I agree with you Paul; a lot of peoples grievances with regards Facebook ’spam’ or privacy issues can be solved if they’d just put a little bit of time, care and effort into sorting out their own Privacy settings within the site.

BUT - I also think it should be far easier to simply and meaningfully set your entire profile to ‘Private’ or ‘Friends Only’ or ‘No/Minimal Emails’, without the need to go through the lengthy and granular ‘Privacy’ settings pages.

I’d consider myself a techie and quite accustomed to how most websites work but I have to admit that I’m taken aback by the sheer amount of options and walls of text within these pages… Profile, Search, News Feed and Mini-Feed, Poke Message and Friend Requests… separate pages for each application… etc, etc,.

It’s much too much and I simply don’t have the spare couple of days needed to sit down and try to figure it all out. At the moment, I *think* I’ve got my privacy settings at an acceptable level.. but honestly? I don’t really know. What happens next time I add an application? Do I have to go through the rigmarole again? Too much.

And maybe you can come back to me with a simple two/three click solution to my problems, but I think if I need to come to a third party (your blog) to figure that out, then Facebook is sorely lacking.

Michael, given that Facebook is good at making small iterative updates, perhaps it’s not yet possible to make those simple changes because of how complicated the technical changes would be to the platform and more importantly, the massive potential to screw up. I do agree it should be easier and your suggestion is a good one.

Paul, I’m willing to bet it would have been less complicated to implement a more simple privacy settings system at the beginning, rather than now when we’ve got countless applications with, as you say, the massive potential to screw up.

Again, whatever way you look at it, I think that’s a failing of the Facebook system.

I’m not saying that it’s not possible to protect your privacy and minimise the spam sent to you on Facebook — your post adequately shows that it is possible — but whether intentionally or not they seem to make doing so very difficult and complicated for the end user. I personally wouldn’t think less of anyone for giving up on the whole thing before they got even halfway though their ‘Privacy Settings’ page.

@Michael, I agree, it would have been easier. But, don’t forget Facebook was launched to support one university and then opened to other universities and then later, opened up to non-universities. So what I’m getting at, is that Facebook’s architecture is probably like a maze as a result of the extensions.

Had Facebook been designed on day one so it could support the unforeseen requirements of today, I’m sure things would have been done differently. To make such huge changes now would surely be very risky.

The reason they don’t have practical and workable privacy controls is not because of legacy systems/software. They have ripped out and rebuilt several times since initial launch.

It is because they don’t have a clue how to really overcome the privacy problems in a meaningful way.

Of course, they keep their thoughts to themselves on that one and when people complain about privacy and other problems they point them to the unworkable and impractible ’solutions’ they ‘have’ put in place. These systems kind of work in theory but they most certainly don’t work in practice.

I think the fact that Paul had to write a blog post at all is evidence that Facebook privacy controls work in theory but not in practice. And the fact that the blog post is so long and took such effort and attention to put together only reaffirms the fact that the controls offered are impracticable. I mean this post took a lot of time and effort to explain only a detail of the ‘highly granular’ (read autistic and byzantine) privacy controls offered.

On the other hand the solutions offered by facebook work amazingly well from a PR perspective. As they 1) deflect complainants from realising that Facebook has really no idea how to solve the problem is a meaningful way 2) facilitate Facebook in accusing the user of lack of commitment to their own privacy if they continue to have problems or fears.

Its a PR double jab like that, that leave people so dazed and confused that they can become kinda brainwashed. So much so that that some highly intelligent and articulate people (not mentioning any names here) write long blog posts based on the assumption that Facebook actually have real solutions available to users that are perfectly workable if only the same users would put in the effort and commitment…

@Naill, I’ve already expressed my opinions so I won’t bored you with them again. It was my intention to *help* users with this post, not to debate the pros and cons of Facebook’s privacy - although I did expect it after my conclusion.

For me personally, the privacy controls are extremely easy to use. I mean, some people complain about receiving email notification when all they have to do is click no the link contained within the email.

How does my post or your comment for that matter, warrant your twitter message? ” Just back from commenting that @PaulWalsh has been suckered by Facebook’s PR”

In no way have I been suckered by any PR company or department. I’m smart enough to make up my own mind about companies, technologies and trends. I also like to believe that my opinions are independent and are in no way, persuaded by anyone.

Paul

Thanks for the long and informative post.

It’s a pity that Facebook’s system is so badly laid out that you have to go to these lengths to help the rest of us
Michele

As for my twitter message. Breaking it down, with a little context

1. It was meant as a tease (in the sense of a bit of light provocative fun)
2. When i posted it I had no idea that you were accused in earnest of being unduly influenced by large corporates in the past.
3. Also I didn’t assume you had any special relationship with the Facebook executive. I wrote assuming you were like the majority of others, that is, vastly more exposed to and influenced by the message that Facebook gets out into the general media. While underexposed to the message of trusted independent observers.
4. I didn’t know (at that time) that FB execs would be emailing you behind the scenes to pat you on the back and congratulate you on putting forward arguments that pleased them.

So that’s the context of the twitter message as I sent it. Totally innocent in intention and innocent of context.

And so back to the original point

Joe put it neatly in the comments of your earlier post saying “Facebook has a long and illustrious history of doing things that increase their reach at the expense of their users privacy and wasted attention time.”

And he also linked one of danah boyd’s article outlining that history.

He puts forward some a very well-balanced source in referencing danah boyd.

On the other hand, we have the voice of Facebook who appoint a VP for Privacy (sounds good so far doesn’t it) who’s background is in Washington serving Clinton’s White House (oh right a spin doctor and PR guy. As the head of privacy. I see. ).

If you got a chance to read or reread danah boyd as recommended by Joe I would really like to hear what you think about what she has to add. Personally I think she has consistently chronicled all the facts and served as a higly reliable witness to all that is to be celebrated in the social networking businesses and also much that many in the business would rather gloss over and have us forget about.

If I was in your position I would probably make a mental note to read/reference a bit of danah after every time I got a pat on the back from a facebook exec. It can only help to quell anyone that might (privately or publicly) call your independence into question.

@Niall - I don’t get notes patting me on the back from FB each time I write something that pleases them. I’m sure they have more to deal with than my blog. I have received one or two notes to acknowledge their appreciation for my opinion as I’m sure they wouldn’t want to get into the debate on my blog.

I’m crap at reading books as my mind wonders and I end up reading the same text over and over. So come back to me in two years and I might have finished it

If Facebook don’t want to get into it where its happening then so much for naked conversations, conversational marketing and catching the cluetrain.

On reading books. I didn’t recommend a book. I recommended a short blog post.

Click on it. Read it. You’ll enjoy it. I promise.

@Niall @Joe - I’ve read the post. It is very interesting and thankfully, it didn’t tell me anything I didn’t already know, or at least, believe myself. So, please allow me to clarify my views in bullet point as it’s easy to distort or misunderstand all of my opinions when one or two posts are taken out of context - or in this case, I haven’t highlighted the things that I don’t like.

I didn’t intend to give a balanced view, it was my intention to help people better understand how to use their privacy settings – hopefully it will.

1. I don’t like the Beacon feature and I never did. Within 10 seconds of hearing about it, I knew it wouldn’t be acceptable by most users.
2. I hate it when companies expect you to read the fine print for stuff that should be obvious to end users. Really, I hate it. In fact, I had a huge argument with a car hire company when Aido and I were trying to get back to Dublin from Cork. Apparently I should have read the terms in order to find out if the company could charge me for things that weren’t displayed to me on the Web site at the time of purchase.
3. I believe Facebook could do a lot more to improve the usability and accessibility of its privacy settings.
4. I do like having granular settings as it allows us to display and hide stuff from specific people and groups.
5. I’d like to point out that I heard more people complain about Facebook not being open to indexing by Google and other search engines than I did for the opposing view - this is exactly what triggered the whole ‘open vs closed’ debate.
6. I should take the time to read comments properly, especially when they link to posts which people like you, recommend to help give me more insight to your opinions

I wonder if this comment warrants a separate post.

[...] would think them stupid. Of course, many of the prominent townspeople went out of their way to lavish wild praise on the magnificent controls introduced by the prince, while denying the fact that they knew them to be unwieldy and [...]

Hey Segala ppl
I like the post - but I’m soooooooo sick of this Facebook privacy thing. In five years time people are going to look back and at the idea that their ‘ancestors’ were putting up so much information about themselves. I used to do myspace, but I never joined FaceBook… because I’ve always considered it a phish farm anyway.

My rule is: if a site even mentions asking for your email password, so they can spam your address book, then i want nothing to do with it (I think they do, right? I seem to remember that’s why I never joined up…)

And tbh if people are dumb enough to give some dronebot their email password, then they pretty much have what’s coming to them.

Also, why don’t you do a post on that idiot with the zapper at CES?
Also, here’s a headline for you: “MacWorld… Does Anyone Really Give A F**k?”