From Facebook, answering privacy concerns with new settings
Six years ago, we built Facebook around a few simple ideas. People want to share and stay connected with their friends and the people around them. If we give people control over what they share, they will want to share more.
Context & Ripple Effects
Facebook framed its 2009 privacy approach around control, simplicity and connection, but the company entered May 2010 amid escalating scrutiny, public criticism and security bugs. A contemporaneous debate over Facebook’s effect on privacy expectations made settings design a trust issue rather than a background feature.
The new controls also sharpen a tension in Facebook’s own messaging: its January 2010 privacy rhetoric treated sharing norms as evolving, while the service’s response to criticism centers on giving users clearer choices over what they disclose.
First-order effects
- Facebook users receive simpler privacy settings intended to give them more direct control over sharing.
- Facebook must make its privacy choices legible enough to address criticism while preserving the sharing behavior its product model depends on.
Second-order effects
- Security bugs and privacy complaints make privacy-setting changes an operational burden for Facebook’s product teams, not solely a communications response.
- Other social-networking services face greater pressure to present sharing permissions as understandable user controls rather than opaque defaults.
Third-order effects
- If user control becomes a condition of participation in social networking, permission design becomes a durable competitive and trust boundary rather than a secondary account setting.
The trend: Social networks are being pushed to pair broad sharing systems with simpler, more visible controls over public and personal data.