Lessons from Facebook

Facebook has been in the news a lot lately, under attack for lax privacy policies and what seems like a never ending stream of bugs and mishaps (each of which seem to result in further exposure of private information). What’s not helping FB either is the walking PR disaster named Mark Zuckerberg. Every attempt by Mark to diffuse the privacy controversy gives further evidence that he just doesn’t get it.

“The default is social.” That’s Mark’s mantra when it comes to sharing, but there are plenty who disagree, if you listen to the blogosphere, twitterverse and the tech media, and at least one major study by the Pew Research Center.

You can’t blame Mark and the Facebook crew for encouraging us to share. That would be fine if that was as far as it went. But you CAN blame them for (a) making over-sharing the default through their many privacy settings, and then (b) making the privacy policy and configuration choices so complicated and difficult to manage that many people give up and go with the defaults. Or else don’t know and don’t care.

The New York Times had a great graphic on FB’s bewildering tangle of privacy options: 50 settings and 170 options. In five years their privacy policy has grown from 1,004 words to 5,830. Compare that to the 384 word statement at Flickr (admittedly one of the shortest cited by the Times).

Zuckerberg has announced that FB will be simplifying how its users will manage their privacy on the site, but given their history we’ll have to watch closely to see how this plays out. Given the new Open Graph API and the Like button (just two examples), there are still many ways for us to be enticed into sharing more than we thought we were.

I think this part of the issue highlights one of the unspoken imperatives for technology professionals. To go along with the obvious obligations like making software work as designed, we should acknowledge the need to keep things simple for the user. Software and technology is getting more complex and harder to manage (as well as more hidden and more pervasive – but that’s another post!). The same capabilities and ever increasing processing power, which give us the ability to make systems feature-rich (or bloated), also give us the ability to make things more customizable, more interactive, more transparent and more responsive to the user. And that doesn’t mean a bunch of default settings that reflect someone else’s choices.