Facebook plans to offer users simpler privacy controls (Yay!) and the ability to more easily find and get rid of photos of themselves they hate on the site. With changes being rolled out over the next month, you'll get more intuitive and easy-to-find privacy settings, and you'll be able to find photos in which you look bad, fat, inebriated, engaged in illegal activity, in love with an ex, or all of the above and inform the people who posted the photos en masse that you would like them taken down. The changes will make protecting your image on the site a little bit easier.
"We're hoping to educate users and help them better understand who can see what on Facebook," says product manager Sam Lessin. "When users are surprised, that is a bad thing."
What would make privacy on the site much better, though, is if Facebook would let its users delete friends and old postings en masse. That would be the quickest way for us to clean up our Facebook pages and get them in line with our current privacy expectations. That, however, is still not being offered, and I wasn't completely satisfied with Lessin's reason as to why not.
First off, the changes: Facebook is making it easier to access and control your privacy settings. Here's the series of screens you currently have to navigate in order to keep your boss from seeing photos of you ringing in the New Year or to keep your friends with terrible judgment from posting those photos of you ringing in the New Year to your Wall in real time. It's basically like a Choose-Your-Own-Privacy-Adventure book:
So many clicks. So many options. It seems designed to flummox the casual user into exposing their skimpy New Year's dress and the amazing facial expressions they're capable of after 10 glasses of champagne.
Once Facebook rolls out its changes over the next month, the privacy controls will be accessible from every single page on the navigation bar and will look like this:
Simplicity appreciated. Though one thing that's being eliminated in the new simple settings is the ability to hide yourself in Facebook search, as noted by Nick Bilton. No more hiding your account. Facebook says that only a "single-percentage" of its users were taking advantage of this privacy measure. Of course, a single percentage point of one billion is a respectable number.
Another change Facebook is making is to force apps on the site to ask for explicit permission to post things on your Wall. (Washington Post Social Reader and Spotify, here's looking at you, kids.) You'll now get two separate permission screens: one to grant the app access to your information and another to give the app the right to tell the world what you watched, listened to, read, bought, liked, kicked, licked, ate, scratched, bit, etc.:
I suggested to Lessin that this was a nice way to introduce some friction into frictionless sharing. "We're just making sure users aren't surprised," he replied.
The other big change in the pipeline is an easier way to find photos of you on the site that you've hidden from your Timeline but that still exist elsewhere on the site -- like in a friend's photo album, for example. You'll be able to use Facebook filters to see which of those photos are viewable by the public, by friends of friends, by friends, etc. and then select a batch of them to untag yourself or to untag yourself and ask the person who controls the photo to take it down. Sadly, there's no facial recognition involved here. It will only show you photos you've been tagged in:
Facebook doesn't want to get involved in the game of getting rid of photos for you, but it is offering up a form letter that you can shoot to other Facebook users telling them why you want the photo taken down. You choose the reason you don't like the photo -- "Embarrassing," "Unflattering," etc. -- and Facebook comes up with a message for you -- "Yo Brian, Take this photo down. It's embarrassing." Facebook has been encouraging users to let people know when they don't like photos on the site, but this is the first time they're allowing them to do it en masse.
"It allows people to solve this themselves," says Lessin, who says the messages "starts a conversation" between users 86% of the time. Facebook couldn't tell me how often it leads to the photo being taken down.
Not that Facebook is finally letting people do things in batches -- an option it's historically not offered -- I asked Lessin about the possibility of mass deletion of friends, for those of us who were a little too promiscuous in Facebook friending and now want to prune our friend lists for the sake of better controlling which friends (and friends of friends) have access to information about ourselves.
"We want users to think about this in context," says Lessin. "We want people to have a deeper relationship with the content than that. Removing friends isn't just like deleting a bunch of emails. The bulk action needs to be used wisely."
In other words, Facebook prefers to make this difficult for users.
Lessin recommended instead taking advantage of Facebook's "acquaintance list" option by which you can put a bunch of people on a list and then limit what they know about you
Sigh.
For a full accounting of all the privacy changes, check out Sam Lessin's post on the Facebook blog.
