Updated: Facebook Admits Mistake, Adds Controls
By Graham Webster
Friday September 8, 2006
UPDATED: Sept. 8, 2006, at 10:23 a.m. EDT
Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg said Friday the launch of the controversial News Feed and Mini-Feed features was a mistake, according to an open letter posted on the site.
”[W]e did a bad job of explaining what the new features were and an even worse job of giving you control of them,” Zuckerberg writes. “I’d like to try to correct those errors now.”
The site introduced customizable feed settings at the same time, allowing users to opt in or out of sending various types of actions to their news feed. For instance, users can now withhold Feed “stories” when they write wall posts but publicize when they add a friend.
The new settings do not, however, give users total control. A short list of actions cannot be removed from the feed: “things you add to your profile, photos you upload or are tagged in, notes you write or are tagged in, groups you join or create, events you create or attend, networks you’ve joined, [and] status updates.”
An update posted Friday at the largest anti-Feed protest group criticized this ommission: “Apparently the changes were not complete, and groups still appear in your news feed. Although it can be considered minor, we asked for this: to be able to remove ourselves completely from news feed. This group will continue to advocate that position until that is fulfilled.” The group had grown past 740,000 members by Friday morning.
The new settings page suggests that Facebook may be open to more changes. There is a link for suggesting control over other features.
While most of the data aggregated by the feed was previously available publicly, the time-stamps added to actions were not previously available in some cases. The settings allow users to remove times from their Mini-Feeds.
These changes come a day after a top official for the website first revealed that new controls were in the works to Campus Progress.
“There will be more controls over the feed product in particular,” said Chris Kelly, Facebook’s chief privacy officer, adding that work has been underway on the additional controls since before the Feed service was launched overnight Monday.
“There are controls built in through the network infrastructure already, and there was a sense that those controls were adequate,” Kelly said of the decision to launch without the added controls.
Kelly did not comment Thursday on whether users would be given the opportunity to opt out of the Feed system completely. “We’re still working on the particulars of what exactly it will look like,” he said.
“We’ve heard our users, as Mark [Zuckerberg, Facebook’s founder] said in his blog post, and we’re working on giving people more control over the information,” Kelly said.
Controversy over the new features erupted Tuesday when users logged in to find the new feature, which records the minute-by-minute public actions of Facebook users and aggregates them in to news feeds.
Ben Parr, a junior at Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill., founded the massive anti-feed group after seeing one other. He didn’t spend much time promoting it, however.
“I told a couple of my friends on the internet to spread the word, and apparently it succeeded greatly,” Parr told Campus Progress Wednesday. Since he started the group, he said he has received “hundreds of Facebook messages, over a hundred friend requests, [and] media calls.”
One discussion topic in the group was called “I want Ben Parr to lose his virginity to me.” Asked what he thought of the advance, Parr said, “I apologize. I’m not quite interested.”
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Comments
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Graham,
It seems like the real privacy issue is the new “Facebook Development Platform” that they snuck under everyone’s nose. This allows them to give:
“your name, your profile picture, your gender, your birthday, your hometown location (city/state/country), your current location (city/state/country), your political view, your activities, your interests, your musical preferences, television shows in which you are interested, movies in which you are interested, books in which you are interested, your favorite quotes, the text of your “About Me” section, your relationship status, your dating interests, your relationship interests, an encrypted user ID associated with your significant other’s Facebook Site profile, your summer plans, your Facebook user network affiliations, your education history, your work history, your course information, copies of photos in your Facebook Site photo albums, metadata associated with your Facebook Site photo albums (e.g., time of upload, album name, comments on your photos, etc.), the total number of messages sent and/or received by you, the total number of unread messages in your Facebook in-box, the total number of “pokes” you have sent and/or received, the total number of wall posts on Wall ™, a list of encrypted user IDs mapped to your Facebook friends, your social timeline, and events associated with your Facebook profile”
to unidentified third-party corporations without your permission. There’s a tiny checkbox on the My Privacy page to opt out, but I wouldn’t have known about it if a friend hadn’t pointed it out.
Who are these “developer” 3rd party corporations and why hasn’t anyone been talking about this real, new breach of privacy?
— Josh Rosenthal - Sep 7, 04:13 PM - #Thanks for your comment, Josh. The terms of service for any third party require that they follow the same privacy settings as the Facebook site itself. The policy says:
“You may display Facebook Properties retrieved through the Facebook Development Platform in any format you choose, subject to the terms and conditions contained in this Agreement; provided, that you may not in any event display to any user of your Application or any other person any Facebook Properties that such user or person would not properly be able to access through the Facebook Site (for example, and without limitation, you may not display information contained in any Facebook Properties that relates to one user to any other user unless such other user is a Facebook Site “friend” of the first user, is in one of the first user’s “networks” as identified on the Facebook Site, or is otherwise able on the Facebook Site to view such information relating to the first user).”
http://developers.facebook.com/tos.php
Usually, when an online company issues an API like this, it opens up their system to outside innovation. For instance, Google Maps released an API which allowed the Center for American Progress to create this great map of alternative fuel gas stations across the United States:
http://www.kicktheoilhabit.org/roadtrip/ (enter your zipcode and click)
It appears that if Facebook successfully enforces its terms of service for the developers, there is no privacy concern. It does, however, decentralize control of your information on Facebook, unless you opt out.
Check back with Campus Progress later. I’ll have a more complete story exploring privacy issues for students soon.
-Graham
— Graham - Sep 7, 04:38 PM - #Do you think a website with millions of users runs in someone’s basement free of charge? You should read the Terms of Service when you sign any contractual agreement.
— CynicalGeek - Sep 8, 09:47 AM - #I don’t mind so much the cluttered home page. Sure, it’s a lot to process, but I usually go right to my wall or messages from there. If Facebook had to add a banner advertisement in order to pay for new servers, I wouldn’t mind the clutter. I can skim over a home page.
I feel that a good degree of control is now available for my privacy. What networks I join, what groups I create, those are actions that almost flaunt the fact that I am doing them. If I don’t want to broadcast my wall posts, I don’t have to. I’m happy.
If I want to control what other people are broadcasting, I accept that I may not be able to. Asking for help with controlling my privacy is a different battle than asking to suppress others freedom of speech and sharing of information.
“Asking for help with controlling my privacy is a different battle than asking to suppress others freedom of speech and sharing of information.”
Think about it. :-)
— Maxwell Bloch - Sep 8, 03:03 PM - #