facebook privacy in a graphic

One reason I deleted my Facebook account was what I perceived to be their shampoo-instruction-style erosion of privacy.  They seemed to be changing things, reacting to public outrage, rolling back a little bit, then repeating.  Slowly, they appeared to be drawing in users and strong-arming them into letting go of some control over their personal data by providing an ultimatum: "keep on top of our policy changes or leave".  I understand they need to make money, but surely there's a more fair way than filing down peoples' control to extract more personal info.

Credit: Matt McKeon http://mattmckeon.com/facebook-privacy/

Browsing around today, I stumbled across Matt McKeon's infographic showing the evolution of Facebook's privacy policies and Kurt Opsahl's related timeline of changes.  The data only goes through 2010 (perhaps their M.O. has changed since then), but it's a striking graphic and worth a look.  It would be fascinating if construction of such an infographic timeline were automated and it could be deployed for other sites out there.

facebook again

Aarrghh!

I was gonna blog about this new Facebook data collection feature, but why rehash a the same thoughts? From Michael Coates:

"The last thing to consider is facebook's track record on protecting data. How long will it be until advertisers find a way to pilfer this data from people? Or what about the next privacy setting overhaul which changes the defaults or makes it more difficult to control who sees your location data?"

And the vicious cycle begins again. I don't agree that it's all about advertisers (I'm an optimist here), but the wash-rinse-repeat cycle gets tiresome: (1) add new data collection feature (2) public outrage (3) respin privacy settings (4) repeat.

facebook privacy erosion

I went into my privacy settings on facebook to turn off the "instant personalization" program (I don't really want facebook to provide my info to other sites automatically), and was a little miffed by the experience of disabling it:

First, I unchecked the box that said "Allow select partners to instantly personalize their features with my public information when I first arrive on their websites." This was me reverting backwards towards previous policies facebook had back when it was not sharing data with third party sites.

Anyway, when I checked the box, I got the usual "are you sure?" dialog that attempted to convince me to reconsider. In addition, it let me know that checking the box won't completely opt me out, since my friends will still be leaking my information to these third party sites.

 Kudos on facebook for telling me this, but why can't the check box actually control both the data I allow to be transmitted and that sent by my friends? They explain in the dialog (and in fine print on the pref page) that I can block the application and that will stop my data flowing from my friends, but for the life of me I can't figure out what the application is called and how to block it. Any advice here?

I don't like that I have to review the facebook privacy policy and the settings page what seems like every time I log in; this is a nasty side-effect of the slow erosion of their privacy policy and settings. I constantly have to be figuring out what kind of relaxing of the privacy policy facebook is doing next. I realize the importance of monetization (and I'm impressed that they're trying to find something new, something not advertisements to make them money), but I guess I value control of my data a bit more than facebook does.