arvind’s posthaven

MoveOn has created a graphic that shows what parts of your profile are public, whether you like it or not. Helpful visual. The Facebook fan page to connect to is ironic, but may be helpful in lobbying Facebook. Maybe.

As usual the New York Times provides an elegant summary via an infographic - in this case, of Facebook's privacy options. If you're a Facebook user, you've probably stumbled through much of this before, but I bet you haven't seen it all! Sadly, I think I have in my quest to remain somewhat private in parts of my online footprint.

Coming soon, my guide on how to wean yourself from Facebook's grip

Via my school's webmaster

Matt McKeon's visualization of how Facebook's privacy rules have changed from 2005-today show how many more people potentially can see what you post. Scary, but fairly accurate if you read my post from last week about Facebook's privacy policy shift over time (in words, not pictures).

My webmaster forwarded this to me today. As a school that uses Facebook, this is something to make very clear to the students and adults in our community.

Commentary by Kurt Opsahl

Since its incorporation just over five years ago, Facebook has undergone a remarkable transformation. When it started, it was a private space for communication with a group of your choice. Soon, it transformed into a platform where much of your information is public by default. Today, it has become a platform where you have no choice but to make certain information public, and this public information may be shared by Facebook with its partner websites and used to target ads.

To help illustrate Facebook's shift away from privacy, we have highlighted some excerpts from Facebook's privacy policies over the years. Watch closely as your privacy disappears, one small change at a time!

Facebook Privacy Policy circa 2005:

No personal information that you submit to Thefacebook will be available to any user of the Web Site who does not belong to at least one of the groups specified by you in your privacy settings.

Facebook Privacy Policy circa 2006:

We understand you may not want everyone in the world to have the information you share on Facebook; that is why we give you control of your information. Our default privacy settings limit the information displayed in your profile to your school, your specified local area, and other reasonable community limitations that we tell you about.

Facebook Privacy Policy circa 2007:

Profile information you submit to Facebook will be available to users of Facebook who belong to at least one of the networks you allow to access the information through your privacy settings (e.g., school, geography, friends of friends). Your name, school name, and profile picture thumbnail will be available in search results across the Facebook network unless you alter your privacy settings.

Facebook Privacy Policy circa November 2009:

Facebook is designed to make it easy for you to share your information with anyone you want. You decide how much information you feel comfortable sharing on Facebook and you control how it is distributed through your privacy settings. You should review the default privacy settings and change them if necessary to reflect your preferences. You should also consider your settings whenever you share information. ...

Information set to “everyone” is publicly available information, may be accessed by everyone on the Internet (including people not logged into Facebook), is subject to indexing by third party search engines, may be associated with you outside of Facebook (such as when you visit other sites on the internet), and may be imported and exported by us and others without privacy limitations. The default privacy setting for certain types of information you post on Facebook is set to “everyone.” You can review and change the default settings in your privacy settings.

Facebook Privacy Policy circa December 2009:

Certain categories of information such as your name, profile photo, list of friends and pages you are a fan of, gender, geographic region, and networks you belong to are considered publicly available to everyone, including Facebook-enhanced applications, and therefore do not have privacy settings. You can, however, limit the ability of others to find this information through search using your search privacy settings.

Current Facebook Privacy Policy, as of April 2010:

When you connect with an application or website it will have access to General Information about you. The term General Information includes your and your friends’ names, profile pictures, gender, user IDs, connections, and any content shared using the Everyone privacy setting. ... The default privacy setting for certain types of information you post on Facebook is set to “everyone.” ... Because it takes two to connect, your privacy settings only control who can see the connection on your profile page. If you are uncomfortable with the connection being publicly available, you should consider removing (or not making) the connection.

Viewed together, the successive policies tell a clear story. Facebook originally earned its core base of users by offering them simple and powerful controls over their personal information. As Facebook grew larger and became more important, it could have chosen to maintain or improve those controls. Instead, it's slowly but surely helped itself — and its advertising and business partners — to more and more of its users' information, while limiting the users' options to control their own information.

Related Issues: Privacy, Social Networks, Terms Of (Ab)Use

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An absolutely elegant document from the Electronic Frontier Foundation explaining how Facebook has continued to back out of their privacy policy with which they solicited users in the first place. It's spiraling to give them more data with which to sell, have people interact, and drive more use to their site.

I'm looking forward to major influencers writing publicly about dropping Facebook and a rash of new sites popping up in its place. I think there is real opportunity here for some entrepreneurs to think about the type of service people are looking for - walled gardens, sharing important memories/information with friends and family, keeping private data private (as much as it can be on the web), etc. Why not build a service that respects individual users? Is that possible? Or is it always about scaling your product as big as it can be?

As a side note: I think Flickr is a beautiful photo-sharing site where I can be public, private, for family, or for friends. Simple, effective. Can social networking sites like Facebook get back to what works?

How do I delete/disable my account?

Ryan Dec 30, 2009

You can disable your account by going to Settings > Disable Account and clicking on "Yes, Disable my Account". You can restore your account later if you choose.

All traces of your profile page and questions users have asked you will disappear.  Questions you have asked others will still appear, as there is no way to ever delete a question you have asked another user.  Only that user can delete it.

I was reading How Privacy Vanishes Online in the New York Times which shows how computer systems can now analyze even seemingly anonymous data to get quite an accurate idea of who you are when a parent of a student asked how she could delete her daughter's formspring account. If you work in a school and haven't heard of formspring, you will soon, so get ready. Anyway, I looked up the answer to her question and came upon the FAQ response above. Wow, what a great lesson for students to read: "Questions you have asked others will still appear, as there is no way to ever delete a question you have asked another user." There is real confusion over what "anonymous" means online, and what "delete" means. For all intents and purposes, I'd argue that neither are a realistic option when online, so consider that the next time you're pressing 'send' or 'post.'

Also given to me recently was the news that there is a new mashup out there mapping Chat Roulette ("anonymous" video chatting) users. It's pretty scary that now your image and your location can be mapped for the world to find you. More on this at Mashable. Here's a previous post of mine on Chat Roulette, for context.