Hallelujah, granularity is here! (Facebook)

So if you’ve logged onto Facebook this morning, you’d find out that Facebook has changed their Privacy controls quite a bit by adding more granularity. Here is what they posted at the top of my News Feed,

We’ve added more privacy options.

Now you can use friend lists to control exactly who can see what. We’ve also added the option to share information with “Friends of Friends”. For more details, check out the Privacy page.

So what does this mean? Let me take a look at all of the different areas we can now tweak, adjusting the visibility of a Facebook user’s account.

• Profile
  • Before, we were limited to creating only one list of people called the “Limited Profile” where users could select portions of their profile to be shown, and the rest hidden to select Friends. In the previous system, it was an all in, the limited profile view, or a complete block of a user. This was limited because most users in the real world have multiple subsets of friends, that could be categorized under “Work/Professional”, “School”, “Family”, and more. These different subsets would only be allowed certain bits of information, such as pictures/videos, what you were doing exactly, or even who your other friends are. Now a user’s profile can be tailored exactly to how they specify them to be. For example, you may not want your professional friends to see any videos or pictures of you so you can create a “friend list” for them, and add that list to a limited group who cannot access those areas of your profile. This is powerful because it enables the Facebook user to more clearly define the offline groups in their Facebook network.
  • On the opposite end of the spectrum, it looks like Facebook has also allowed users to open up their profile more if they choose to do so. They have added a new grouping of access called “Friends of Friends”. This can be enabled for the different areas of the profile to make it easier for second degree friends to access certain bits of your profile, such as your contact info and basic information. This is good for those who have a small Facebook network of people and are willing to give more information out to more friends of friends that will help make more connections possible.

All in all, this is what I have been waiting for. I haven’t found any real faults with the addition of more advanced, granular customizations to the Privacy area of my own Facebook account. I believe it can only improve the usability of Facebook. In my first module paper, which I have attached here Facebook’s Pattern for Privacy Concern, it looks as if Facebook has answered my plea. Thanks Mark and Company!

Just let me opt-out by default please. Thanks.

So in my ongoing quest to find all things interesting on the internet, I started noticing something strange this weekend. Do you ever type in the wrong URL for a particular website you want to access? We all do.

Normally you’d see an error like this in Firefox:

But if you have Time Warner Cable as your ISP, then you might have started to notice this when you mistype your URL:

Now I didn’t think much of it at first, but then the more that I ran into it, the more irritating it got. So Time Warner Cable is in a way, invading my privacy. Yes I suppose it might be useful if I meant to type in www.annenbergonlinecommunities.com (correct) vs www.annenbergonlinecommunitiess.com (which is incorrect). But more disturbingly, is what is suggested to me as “related searches”. I’m not sure what the hell is going on here, (I clear my cookies out all the time, and delete all private information from my browser on a regular basis) so I have no idea where it’s getting this information from as “relevant”. So military.com, blackpeople.com, Gay Boy, so on and so forth, Road Runner is telling me this is relevant to www.annenbergonlinecommunitiess.com???? Seriously now… that’s ridiculous!

I guess what really irks me is the fact that something so simple as an error message has transformed into an ISPs attempt monetize its users’ mistakes. Yes, I can see how this may be helpful, but can they make it any more obvious what they are trying to do? I’d like to see an initial page explaining what the DNS redirection is doing before they actually do it. And what about giving the users the choice to opt-in or opt-out in the first DNS redirection.

What this all boils down to is net neutrality. We’ve seen users’ Google home pages hijacked by ISPs before which made some people mad. So how does this all relate to the privacy concerns of online communities? Well if you remember, Facebook released a very unpopular feature called beacon. It caused a major uproar for it’s privacy issues. Well long story short, Facebook eventually gave its users the ability to opt-out from using the feature. I’d say I’m definitely a big proponent for letting the user decide whether or not to use a particular feature. Additionally, I say we give the user the choice from the start, before the feature is even used or implemented (like the ISP’s DNS redirection, beacon, etc). Why not make it clear what is being offered as a “service” to those users who don’t understand all of this legal mumbo-jumbo. Yes I know I can turn of Time Warner Cable’s DNS redirection here and beacon as described here.

But can they just make it easy on a user, especially the moms and dads, the less tech-savvy, uninformed average Joe/Jane of the internet. So yes, we can opt-out, but we need to critically think about the options given to us by our online communities, and now, even our ISPs. Give me the option to choose, and give me an explanation that even my grandmother would be able to understand.