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This week Facebook rolled out some of the most sweeping changes to the site in recent memory. These changes revolve around their privacy settings, which were previously fairly complicated, poorly organized and in some cases just confusing.

A few months ago, ReadWriteWeb posted an article called 5 Easy Steps to Stay Safe (and Private!) on Facebook. I was hoping that some of these new privacy changes on Facebook would actually make it easy because if you read the ReadWriteWeb article referenced above you will realize that it devotes 1500 words to this topic… far too many to make some changes to protect your identity.

Unfortunately I have to say that the new Facebook privacy changes are problematic to me for a few reasons.

1. Facebook encourages you to default your information to Public (which they label Everyone). Everyone means the entire internet has access to this data. The power of defaults means that anyone who is confused or ignores the privacy wizard will likely and unknowingly leave things public.
2. More information about you is now public. This includes things like your gender, hometown, list of friends, pages you are a “Fan” of. Previously the only public data was your name. By making more information about you public and making it harder or impossible to prevent this from being public just exposes more of your information to potential risk. It can also can make things awkward, for example if I am a Fan of a page that is a result of my personal or religious beliefs I may not want this information visible to people I haven’t “friended” on facebook. To be clear, you cannot do anything about this information being public. When you go through the transition tool, this information is visible to all.
3. Granular control over what public information is visible to search engines was removed. Previously you could specify what public info was available to search engines, now you can only turn that feature on or off. Perhaps a good simplification.
4. Features called “privacy” features have nothing to do with Privacy. For example, Facebook has a feature that lets you turn off your friends list so other Facebook users cannot see who you are friends with. When this feature was hastily implemented you could sign out of Facebook and see the list of Friends. Just yesterday they updated this, and can now hide your friends list when signed out if you chose this option, however, it’s still considered public information and visible to Facebook applications. Confused? To make matters worse, this option is not listed on your privacy settings page, rather in an obscure setting page off your profile.

I could go on, but I highly recommend reading the Electronic Frontier Foundation article on the new changes.

Further the ACLU has posted the following article which brings to light some of the problems with Facebook’s new privacy tool:

We have three primary privacy concerns with the new system:

1. There's more "publicly available information" that you can't control: Before the recent changes, you had the option of exposing only a "limited" profile, consisting of as little as your name and networks, to other Facebook users—and nothing at all to Internet users at large. Now your profile picture, current city, friends list, gender, and fan pages are "publicly available information," which means you have no way to prevent any other Facebook user from viewing this information on your profile, and you can only prevent Internet users from viewing this information by disabling search entirely (which you can't do through the Transition Tool).
2. Facebook is "recommending" that you loosen your privacy settings: For most users, including those who have never changed their Facebook privacy settings, the recommended settings make information less protected and more widely available than the previous default settings. For example, as of last Friday, sensitive information like relationship status and gender preference was available only to your friends by default; now Facebook encourages users to make this information available to "everyone!"
3. The "Transition Tool" does not allow most users to strengthen privacy settings: Facebook's Transition Tool gives you only two choices: keep your current settings or switch to Facebook's recommendations. And since Facebook's recommendations are less private than the previous default settings, most users have to click through to another page of privacy controls in order to strengthen their settings.

This problem is bigger now because Facebook has become such a mainstream part of life for so many people. I’m connected to so many folks on Facebook and genuinely value the experience they provide… allowing me to stay in touch with people and broadcast information to them as well as serendipitously discover information and life events happening in my social circle. However, I also feel a responsibility to ensure that the people I know on Facebook are making informed choices about their privacy settings when Facebook is making such significant changes in an important area.

The remainder of this post is really just some simple instructions for how you can keep your information private in light of these new changes, and something I wrote so that I could instruct my non technical friends and family members on how to stay safe and secure on Facebook. This does not necessarily reflect how my settings are configured, but rather things you should evaluate yourself to make an informed decision.

1. Old settings are safer when you see the Privacy tool

Generally your old settings are not set to Everyone and are more restrictive than what Facebook wants, so on this screen set your choice to Old Settings if Everyone is the only other choice. Later on make sure to take a look at the privacy settings page to ensure that the settings reflect what you want.

 

2. Public search

If you don’t want your public Facebook info to appear in search engines (including all the new public information they make available) then disable this option. In the previous version of Facebook there was much more control about what information was provided to search engines (like your picture, list of friends, pages etc). These options are now gone and there is a single setting to control if all your Facebook public info is provided to search engines.

From your Settings –> Privacy select Search and unchceck the Allow Indexing option.

You can also optionally prevent Everyone on Facebook from finding you. What you do here is up to you. I don’t mind letting Facebook users find and friend me since that’s how folks ultimately look you up, but I’m strongly considering setting this option to Friends and Network or Friend of Friends.

3. Unfriend any Pages you would not want a stranger or some one you have not “friended” to know about.

By default all the Pages you are a Fan of are now public domain. Depending on the kinds of pages you might friend this could be a really tricky and difficult thing. For example, potential employers could use this data, anyone really can make a specific judgment about you with what was once fairly private information. So just be aware, that fanning a page is like putting a sticker on your forehead with that company / brand / cause for the world to see.  

4. Don’t let your friends share your personal Info

You know all those games your friends play that constantly spam your Feed? Well guess what, all your Friends are giving away your info and you probably didn’t know that.

Go to Privacy Settings –> Applications and Websites.

I honestly have no idea how these settings affect things like what my friends will see if they use a Facebook Connect application to get their Activity Stream. I just unchecked everything and hit save. till Facebook can explain this better, it’s a waste of time to try and figure it out.

Should I let my friends be able to take my private info and give it away to any web site that they use? From the sounds of it, no.

5. Check the permissions on your photo albums

Go to Privacy –> Photos

Check and see how your albums are permissioned. If you see an Album that is set to Everyone it means the internet has access to it.

Bottom Line

I joined Facebook so that I could connect with real people that I know, and have a private place to share status, photos, links, videos etc and have a conversation with them, and stay informed about what they were doing. With more information being public and more users defaulted to public, Facebook becomes less intimate, private and understandable for sharing this kind of information (I already use Twitter to share publicly). I’ve tried to set up the privacy settings to keep things the way they were, but this will be an ongoing struggle I imagine since Facebook will continue to evolve and they will continue to push things to be public since it’s in their best interests (but not mine).

I imagine this story will continue over the coming months as Facebook reacts to user feedback. Making sweeping changes like this is not easy, but my main issue here is that what they did is non consistent with what they said they would do.

Further I am mainly concerned with what my friends and family do or don’t do regarding this new privacy rollout. If anything this is a reminder to go and visit your social networks and re-evaluate what info you have there, what information is public and if you are OK with that. Generally as some one who started out as a blogger many yeas ago, I’m generally more comfortable with some of my information and activity to be public, but I did pay the ultimate price for that once, so now I tend to think more about my online safety and privacy.