FaceBook, Privacy, and Content Grabbing

FaceBook has had a habit of arbitrarily changing their privacy policy, and modifying the software that allows FaceBook members to control what they want to share and with whom they wish to share. As the service has grown to, according to FaceBook, 400 million registered users with a privacy policy that is longer than the Constitution of the United States—and more arcane. One of FaceBook's recent changes was making privacy settings opt-in, that is, users' information is considered public by default. If you don't want anything you post or any information you provide to be made public, you need to set the privacy settings. This is fundamentally bad software design. You can see the increasing co-opting of FaceBook's users content by FaceBook here, in this graphic that shows the increasing absence of privacy, and member control over their data.

On April 19th, Facebook removed the ability of members to control access to their personal identity and interests. Parts of a member's profile "including your current city, hometown, education and work, and likes and interests." As the EFF notes, an interest in, say, stamp collecting, is hardly something that needs to be protected via a privacy setting. The point of making interests unilaterally public is so that advertisers and third-party companies can use interests to target advertisements. But there's another potential issue here: what if your "Interests" include abortion rights, or GLBT causes, or Islam, or Alcoholics Anonymous: it means someone with opposing interests, like a hate group, can target you as well, even publicize your interest in a list, complete with where you live. If you don't want this information to be public, your only option is to delete it. As I've noted elsewhere, this is obfuscation by design; FaceBook wants to use your data, information about you, to sell advertisements, and to make it simpler for them to use your content on their Community pages—without you having any way to control it, or even seeing where it is used.

Currently, FaceBook requires members who want to control their privacy to cope with 50 settings with more than 170 options, as this New York Times graphic shows. If you're curious about what information about you is public on FaceBook, take a look at the data that is displayed when you enter your FaceBook ID here. If you want to see your Privacy settings, and modify them, this bookmarklet from Reclaim Privacy can help.