Sign of the times

Facebook’s  new Privacy system greeted users last week with a pop-up window inviting them to review their privacy under the new settings. The move touched off a storm of coverage from blogs and newspapers scrambling to understand and critique the new rules.

The consensus from journalists and privacy professionals was that useful new controls had been introduced which allowed users to fine-tune who could see each of your Facebook updates. But recognition of these new tools available “under the hood” as CNet’s Rafe Needleman put it was usually accompanied with criticism of the new privacy “reception” page or “Transition tool”, which users only see once when they first log in. This page presented a new option to share with “Everyone” which, many argued, would encourage or “push” users to share more.

The original “Transition tool” seen by some users

The Electronic Frontier Foundation strongly criticised the “Transition tool” shown above, because it “recommended” the “Share with Everyone” option by pre-selecting it before the user did anything. It’s important to note that this wasn’t my experience when I logged in late on Wednesday: presumably in response to criticism, Facebook seem to have changed the tool so that the user’s “Old Settings” are pre-selected.

While giving users new privacy tools is undoubtedly a good thing, it does seem strange that Facebook presented users with such a stark choice between sharing with “everyone” and retaining their “old settings”. Many journalists and bloggers argue that this choice of defaults alone represented an encouragement or “push” to users to share with everyone.

Why would some people assume that Facebook wants everyone to share everything? Well, mainly because it’s widely speculated that Facebook wants to move its business into Real-Time Search: it wants people to use its search function to find out what people are saying about a topic right now, in the same way that people currently use Twitter Search.

But for us, the whole incident is evidence of the importance of user literacy and awareness. The fact that Facebook was prepared to interrupt every single user’s experience with a pop-up encouraging them to review their privacy is itself a good sign. The evidence that Facebook have responded to public pressure to reverse a potentially disastrous choice of defaults is certainly cause for cheer.

But people online, and children especially, need to be aware that there are safe and unsafe ways to use social networking, just like there are safe and unsafe ways to cross the street.

The Facebook press room says that only about 25% of Facebook users change their privacy settings from the default. That’s a startlingly small number.

When too few people understand the importance of privacy settings, as is clear from Facebook’s own statistics, it doesn’t matter how many options Facebook introduces to allow people to keep themselves safe. This gives Facebook a responsibility to look after its users, point them towards Privacy and maintain a basic level of safety. But it should tell us that we also have a responsibility to educate ourselves and the next generation about the systems we use. And especially so when one of those systems is a multi-billion dollar information brokerage with a “population” approaching that of the United States.

And that’s a sign of the times.