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The process was misleading. The default selection was based on users' previous settings only if they had changed them in the past, and as Facebook has pointed out, only 20% of people have done so. That forces the rest of users to make a choice that most neither understand nor want to make.

People see Facebook as a way to privately share their life with friends. That's the foundation on which Facebook was built - that's the core aspect that convinced people to abandon other social networks for FB - and now they are idiotically abandoning that core principal and needlessly exposing their users.

Personally, as a web app developer, I'm confused about the process myself. The privacy dialog seemed to suggest that no matter what my settings are, my name, profile picture, and friends list will be public to all. If I'm being given more choice about my privacy, why is this choice being taken away from me? Until this point, I had the choice of being pretty much invisible from anyone but my friends.

Back when people used Myspace, it was quite open by default as well. The difference is that on Myspace your name could be Donald Duck, your location could be set to Antarctica and nobody cared. You could invent your own privacy controls where they didn't exist. Try doing something that on Facebook and your account will be instantly suspended.

This is not about users being dumb or not. Many intelligent people don't know (or care to know) the intricate details of web apps.

Time will prove you right or wrong, but I believe that people will in general adapt to the way the web changes. I think it's a challenge to educate users so that you can have a featureful app without causing them harm, but I don't think it's impossible. The web populace has grown vastly more informed in just the last five years- why should we decide they won't be able to grasp this extra control?

Facebook is ambitious; it wants to be a lot of things. It wants to continue to be the service where you talk only to your friends, but it also wants to be other things. We believe we can do other things as well as we've done friend-only social networking. That may be a misjudgement, we'll find out.

Re: your friend list: http://blog.facebook.com/blog.php?post=197943902130

Re: The other settings that became publicly available- I think it was a call they made, balancing what is good for the network and what is reasonable for the individual on a social networking site. Some of it had to do with what privacy was feasible to enforce (given that you had to have Search on the site, and different levels of indexing etc), and I don't necessarily know all the details here.

The primary goal was to /simplify/ privacy settings, and make it more fine-grained, which they've clearly done.

The other settings that became publicly available- I think it was a call they made, balancing what is good for the network and what is reasonable for the individual on a social networking site.

Who your friends are and what groups you are a member of is potentially consequential information. This was the fatal flaw in Livejournal's privacy system. Sure you could make your journal entries friends-only but your profile - your friends list, your interests, your groups and your profile pictures - were always public. If you were involved in anything that you maybe didn't want your current/future employer/cow-orkers (say) to know about, the ONLY safeguard was to keep your username a secret. Well on Facebook, you're supposed to use your real name...

"People see Facebook as a way to privately share their life with friends." Fits what people in my family think (I'm not a user). I haven't thought it was a good choice for that, because huge sites tend to attract hacks. If private sharing is the reason most people go there, then I'd think FB would want the UI for privacy to be very transparent (at the "here's what happens when you click this, and here's what non-friends will see" level).

Twitter's UI surprised me. I used the 'public' setting; as their docs described it, I expected @someone messages would be seen only by people following me -and- the recipient. Wrong. When I googled my t-name, all my tweets, including those @ messages, were wide open to the whole net. Whoa!

You have to remember that Twitter is dumb. "@" is just a character. (But "d" makes it private.)

"best way to provide utility to the user" in aggregate only. For those who want privacy, what existed was just fine. Same as 'obvious features that would be bettered". Twitter defaults to everything-open and we all knew that from day 1. Facebook keeps trying to "increase utility" for me. I don't want that - I just want to share info with my friends. MySpace has maximum utility because any pr0n star can friend you. Do not want.

The article doesn't say EULA's are cheating you, it says that Facebook is destroying the trust users have that most sites will treat your privacy carefully.

Pretty much every feature Facebook adds has encountered this reaction. I think that on average, the subsequent usage and adoption statistics do not support your claim that users don't want increased utility.

It is true that a few things have become less private, but on the whole, the privacy of things on Facebook is easier to control, finer-grained and clearer to people.

My point is not that increased utility is bad, it's that what you consider increased utility is not what I might. Reduced privacy is a reduction in utility to me.

Now, note - I'm a FB app writer. I'm happy I can see more of this info. My own privacy settings are tighter than most, so I don't lose out there either. However, if FB wants to provide utility to users, educate them much more about the implications of each checkbox because most users still don't get why it's important.

Fair enough.

Agree - I didn't have all my settings defaulted to _everyone_ - there were a few, but for the most part the "new" settings were the same as the old ones.

What really did piss me off, however, was the re-classification of my profile picture and friends list as publicly-available information. Maybe I'm misreading the policies, but it seems like there's now no way to not share/make available to third-party apps my picture and friends list - which I previously didn't share with any non-friends.

Re the friends list: http://blog.facebook.com/blog.php?post=197943902130

This post describes a checkbox to hide or show the list on your profile page. It goes on to say that regardless of the setting, the friends list is now public information. That means that even if you choose to "hide" it, anyone can hack a URL to insert your facebook ID and see your friends' list. It's a confirmation that privacy regarding friend lists is gone, which is really unfortunate.

My impression is that this change was actually driven by implementation feasibility- for reasons I'm not completely clear on, search indexing and the interface could not unambiguously respect privacy for friend lists (since so much of the indexing depends on what paths are reachable). The choice then, was to upfront about the lack of privacy in this respect, or to just hide it from profile and pretend it was private. Facebook chose the former.

I'm sorry, but there could be no "implementation feasibility"-based justification to make this data public. The same check to determine whether to grant access to a single status update could be used to determine whether to grant access to a friend list.

It's true that someone could figure out a partial list of who you were friends with by spidering the friends lists of others who had chosen to share their list, but that is no justification for removing privacy.

I don't know the actual details here, so I can't really comment.

Re your second point though: I think it's much more important that people understand where they really stand in terms of what is private, even if that isn't everything they'd like- as opposed to discovering later that something they thought was private could be accessed via a workaround.

That's like saying "Well, since it's possible for someone to social engineer the password of my server, I might as well remove the firewall, switch to telnet and chmod everything to 777."

It's important to tell people to know where they really stand in terms of privacy, and then continue to do your best to protect it. The fact is that privacy - like security - is not a binary. It's something that you protect with various overlapping strategies that reduce the risk as much as possible. Few people expect Facebook to provide them with total protection of their data; instead, they expected them to do the best they can. And that's what Facebook has done for the past five years; they went far beyond anyone else in terms of protecting privacy, and even after they were miles ahead of the competition, they continued to improve it. Now they've destroyed all of that progress in the scope of a few days.

It's a question of how difficult the workaround is. In this case, I think it maybe had to do with showing mutual friends in search results- not showing them made the results very difficult to pick through, and showing them was a privacy flaw. This isn't a very effective protection. I believe that the basic idea of protecting privacy as far as possible has not changed, but of course I'm going to say that :)

To paraphrase Spolsky: users don't read dialog boxes. Especially verbose dialog boxes.

As for me, yet another reason I don't have a Facebook account.

As for everyone else, assume that anything you put on-line will eventually (if not immediately) become public forever.