Facebook Privacy Changes: Hidden Implications

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Facebook privacy changes have been finally unleashed to the users. A week ago, Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg in an open letter on revised privacy controls had revealed the plans to remove regional networks completely and create a simpler model for privacy control. The new set of privacy controls by Facebook have been implemented and has created much fuss for the pros and cons attached with it privacy changes. The tools have been designed to simplify the site’s notoriously confusing privacy options. Facebook also rolled out a Transition tool that would promote updates as the new default. We set out to evaluate the imapct of Facebook privacy changes on users and its future of social networking as whole.

Benefits of Simpler Privacy setting

For all these years Facebook users have been baffled over the intricacies of privacy settings. The privacy settings have been simplified. The idea is based on reducing the overall number of settings while making them easier and intuitive for the users. The simplification of Facebook’s privacy settings would include the elimination of regional networks. These would allow people to unwittingly share their Facebook profile with the entire city.

Facebook has added a feature that uses have advocated - defining the privacy of your Facebook content on per-post basis. Suppose you want your close friends to see a particular photo or just your business colleague to see any particular status update. This can be done through a simple drop down menu, which let’s you define that piece of content.

Many Facebook users keep going with the default Privacy Settings. However, the new Facebook initiative would inspire the users to pay attention to their privacy settings. Clearly, the developments will help users to review and customize their level of privacy on Facebook.

On the darker side

Facebook privacy changes were intended to get people to open up even before the Facebook data was made public. The most interesting facet of the new privacy changes includes the Transition tool that is preselected by default. It will restrict access to everything that is shared. This would imply that Facebook’s reputation as a social network is at stake.

The way Facebook makes its recommendations will have a huge impact on the site’s future. Right now, most people don’t share their content using the ‘everyone’ option that Facebook introduced last summer. If Facebook pushes users to start using that, it could have a better stream of content to go against Twitter in the real-time search race. But Facebook has something to lose by promoting ‘everyone’ updates: given the long-standing private nature of Facebook, they could lead to a massive privacy fiasco as users inadvertently share more than they mean to.

Facebook is trying to spice up the news as a benefit for users. This is how Techcrunch explains that strategy

The way Facebook makes its recommendations will have a huge impact on the site’s future. Right now, most people don’t share their content using the ‘everyone’ option that Facebook introduced last summer. If Facebook pushes users to start using that, it could have a better stream of content to go against Twitter in the real-time search race. But Facebook has something to lose by promoting ‘everyone’ updates: given the long-standing private nature of Facebook, they could lead to a massive privacy fiasco as users inadvertently share more than they mean to.

Clearly, the new Facebook privacy changes has been designed to force the users to share much more of their Facebook info with people. For any social network such a shift would mean compromising any users privacy  privacy level

In case you were not following Facebooks developments, it’s important for you to know that a few months ago Faebook introduced the Everyone update feature. This was another feature on Facebook that compromised on privacy. The content posted on Facebook is safe within the privacy features, but the everyone update feature were accessible to the web users at large. This would mean that Facebook will leverage it for real-time search at large, like Twitter and syndicate to other places such as Google and Bing. This feature was avoided by most users and probably a lot of them had no knowledge about it. The privacy option that Facebook launched today will make it default option for other users.

The media is highlighting Facebook’s press release, which boasts Facebook is giving users more controls than ever before

Setting a new standard in user control… calling on its more than 350 million users to review and update their privacy setting… As users move through the Transition Tool, they’ll be presented with an opportunity to “Learn More. Through this link, they’ll reach Facebook’s new Privacy Center, a comprehensive guide that helps users understand and control how they share information.

Given the privacy risks, it’s appreciable that Facebook’s policy of better privacy control will hamper its reputation of a irreprehensible social network. To ensure that users don’t accidentally share more than what they intend to. To solve this you might look to Facebook’s recommended settings, but that doesn’t seem justified.

What’s the solution

Facebook will push you to share more with everyone by pointing to the new per-post privacy options. If you are not willing to share a particular piece of content with everyone, Facebook will argue. Now the question is how do you escape Facebook’s undesired arguments.  What you might do is set the privacy level for that piece of content to something else. There is a much safer option that requires you to set privacy to restrictive level.

Worsening Privacy Controls

The worst part of Facebook privacy changes is that the information you used to control is now treated as publicly available.  Under the new Facebook privacy changes your personal information - your name, profile picture, current city, gender, networks, and the pages that you are a fan of - will be treated as publicly available information or PAI. Earlier users could restrict access to such information. These privacy options have been eliminated. The feature that allowed users to prevent everyone from seeing the friends list have been removed completely from the privacy setting page.

Facebook alone has maintained control over the vast majority of content uploaded to the site. Get rid of it on Facebook, and it’s usually gone, at least from the prying eyes of a stranger. It’s clear from Facebook’s privacy policy statement

If you delete “everyone” content that you posted on Facebook, we will remove it from your Facebook profile, but have no control over its use outside of Facebook.

That would imply, if users do limit sharing content far more than they intended to, Facebook would be nailing its own coffin. What remains to see is the imact of the move on Facebook addicts, who do a lot of sharing on the site regularly. Conclusively, people might no longer perceive it as the social networking site with expected privacy controls, which actually made it popular.