Are you really editorializing in a HN submission's title?
338 karma · joined April 12, 2008
I don't know what you're talking about in your side note -- if you haven't seen big dialogs popup or messages on the front page, your settings shouldn't change magically. I know we don't always do a great job of communicating exactly what has changed, but we certainly don't change things behind your back, and certainly not maliciously.
The most important thing is that although we started as a very simple profile-plus-friends social network, there are now a very large number of people connected in this manner.
We have the opportunity for the first time to really let a user define their identity in one place [their relationships to real people and entities in the real world, their likes and dislikes], and shape the content on the web around that identity.
We have the ability to share that opportunity with smart hackers everywhere -- but we obviously cannot just willy-nilly hand over the data to anyone. We need to define a usable API, a set of acceptable practices, a way to enforce these things so we respect the user's trust without completely destroying the app developer's ability to do something useful.
This is really hard. We're slowly finding our way to doing this well, but there are many unforeseen issues, especially because app developers have a lot of money at stake. We're iterating on our API, trying to change up the constraints on developers.
At the same time, several cool applications wouldn't be possible if everyone were to keep everything private from everyone -- you have to be social to some extent on a social network if you are to derive any value from it. So we're trying to get people using this complicated privacy interface where you can control publicness/privateness at a very fine grained level, but you need to understand many things to do this correctly.
We're also trying to set things up so that you can hide things as you want from the real people who might judge you for it or whatever, but at the same time, you can get functionality related to that interest from some application [for example, you may not want to tell your friends you like Britney Spears, but Pandora should still be able to play you Britney Spears and similar music].
There's a whole other dimension related to the Open Graph stuff -- building a "semantic web", having one graph where users and entities are connected and organized in a way that can be leveraged to do all these cool things that the web originally promised but hasn't been able to deliver.
There are tremendous engineering challenges to putting all this together.
As you can see, this is a lot of balls to be juggling. Our philosophy has always been to iterate quickly, correct missteps just as quickly, and not be afraid to innovate.
There are a few things I'm pretty confident we don't ever want to do-- the first of which is that we don't want to ever sell user data. That would be an incredibly stupid business decision for a company that wants to help you manage your identity on the web, and we recognize better than anybody that users need to trust us.
I think I've gone on long enough-- I'm not sure I actually answered your specific question. Hopefully my blathering was useful to give you some feel for our motivations though. If you want to learn more, you can listen to some of the talks here: http://apps.facebook.com/feightlive/ . I recommend the closing remarks by Chris Cox.
But my claim is (a) for a site like Facebook to work "well" [where we can argue ad infinitum what "well" means], some information needs to be shared in the system, and some needs to be private. (b) this is often different for different groups of people. You now have to implement a privacy system that works for every piece of content, for every set of users that I want to define a setting for. I think you'll quickly come to something fairly complicated. There are very smart people trying to come up with abstractions and interfaces that make this easy to do, but I fear that at the end of the day, users are simply going to have to learn some new tricks if they don't want to be surprised. And that means, we have to figure out how to explain this complex system to them.
If you're interested in seeing if your settings are working, you can try the "Preview my profile" button on that page.
Btw, I found that page under top right Account->Privacy.
- I wasn't involved enough with the Instant Personalization product to be comment on it competently.
- As for criticism, you can be sure we're watching very closely. IMO, much of it is because people don't really understand the changes or what is affected (as you point out, this stuff is insanely complicated, and we need to do a lot better at explaining and clarifying it to people).
- You can absolutely have free form text. The "Bio" field on your profile is free form.
Why can't you have it in the "Favorite blah" boxes?
(a) Users simply used Pages to do this a lot more than they used the free form text. That stuff was edited once, and it wasn't convenient to maintain as your likes and dislikes changed.
(b) We think there is significant utility that we can provide to the user from having this information in a structured format. Instant personalization aside, going to Pandora and hearing your favorite music play is pretty cool. We think we can do a lot more here.
Religion is already not in this set -- it was not included in the Connections change recently.
[Where there are valid criticisms, you can be sure we're taking them very seriously.]
Previously, the text in these boxes was a link to a search result for users who mentioned this text. Now it is a link to a Page where a small, random set of the users who mentioned the text are displayed. You can still control the visibility of these links on your profile. You'd still have to either visit a lot of users' profiles (and they'd have to have set their interests to be visible), or you'd have to reload a Page a lot of times.
(As for "Favorite Quotes", I will look into what is going on with it).
Thank you for your detailed feedback, btw.
I'm not convinced that the article demonstrates anything yet -- it doesn't really explain how this targeting was done, just vaguely claims this is because of some "new" changes in connections privacy. My whole point is that there isn't anything new about the way Page connections behave.
What is new, as you said above, is that the plain text boxes where users put in their favorite movies etc, are now links to Pages. Previously, these movie strings were actually links to a search for users who mentioned the same text. What has changed is the target of this link -- it is now a Page instead of a search result. And as before, you can still control the visibility of these boxes on your Profile.
Separately, while it is true that you can be seen on the Fans section of a Page, the chances that this will happen are pretty small- try this Page: http://www.facebook.com/pages/The-Lord-of-the-Rings-film-tri... . I believe the six or so images of non-friends are random each time.
It is unclear to me which "new" policies they are referring to in this article: (a) Pages you fanned have always been public. (b) The "Religious Views" and "Political Views" fields on your profile were not included in the conversion to Page connections, explicitly to avoid this sort of thing. (c) I'm also not sure how they decided that profiles were being automatically deactivated based on reports. (d) The article doesn't really clarify how these "targets" are being identified -- that seems somewhat important to decide whether Facebook's "new" policies are making harassment easy...
As for your bet, the obvious counterargument is that 400 million users still visit the site every month, and I haven't seen any signs that that graph is even slowing down. Isn't that a more convincing statement than a poll or a forum with very vocal techies?
IMO, Facebook isn't a finished product. The product changes in ways that are hopefully useful to the majority of users over time. It isn't always possible [and it isn't simple, and it adds complexity, and bugs, and it doesn't make sense] to maintain every feature that once existed -- the product would stagnate if we tried to do that.
All I can say in response to your answers is that Facebook engineers and designers are some of the smartest people I know.
I tend to think that if you're unsatisfied with what they're producing, (and assuming you're willing to accept that malice isn't the reason) then either
(a) the problems they're solving are really hard and you're underestimating these problems or
(b) you're much smarter than them - perhaps you can help us do a better job [drop me a line].
The privacy changes are a side effect of having these be connections instead of free text. Keep in mind the number of connections that an average user makes (all the Likes they attach to Pages, to Open Graph objects, friend connections) - would you have a Privacy control per connection? It's already not an easy task to keep the privacy controls so the average user can understand and use them correctly [and we can always improve this] -- just imagine the complexity we'd add to the system. What exists instead is the ability for you to control the visibility of all these connections on your own Profile. "Public" means that your association with these objects may appear elsewhere [for example, a friend may reveal that you're friends with them, or a Page may reveal you Like that Page.]. I think this is a decent balance between giving the user what they want primarily (to control whether visitors to their Profile see that they are connected to something), and managing overall complexity.
[Edit: this is my opinion, I perhaps don't know enough about the privacy decisions to represent them completely. ]
Here's a more detailed explanation: http://www.facebook.com/privacy/explanation.php
[I work for Facebook. My opinions are my own.]
The majority of interests you would've been linked to would not give you News Feed items (they're "voiceless" Pages).