I’ve written countless times about Facebook’s “privacy facade” and how it could develop potential problems in their global expansion. Today, some developers and bloggers were disappointed that Facebook did not open up unrestricted global access to users’ streams. This means that developers cannot develop tools to analyze the information being shared on Facebook in aggregate unless every Facebook user installs their application.
Facebook’s privacy settings inherently limit the company’s ability to take on a product like Twitter Search which gives you access to 99 percent of the status updates taking place within the global Facebook network. This inability was the foundation of Marshall Kirkpatrick’s argument this afternoon that “the conversation on Facebook remains fundamentally closed due to extensive privacy limitations and the company’s disinterest in overcoming those limitations in an appropriate way.”
Do Users Want Privacy?
I would argue that Facebook can never eliminate Twitter unless they remove privacy settings. Facebook has always assumed that users want the ability to control their privacy on a granular level but on Twitter privacy has been boiled to two settings: private and public. The vast majority of users opt for public because they are either not aware of the privacy settings or choose not to enable them.
This brings up a fundamental question: do Facebook users truly want Facebook privacy settings? While many Twitter users would argue against privacy settings, Facebook knows that at least 30 percent of users actively manage their privacy settings. Dave McClure states a key example of why privacy settings are important in response to Marshall Kirkpatrick’s post:
my wife only wants me to upload photos of our kids to online services that have friends & family settings — she explicitly DOES NOT want me to do so on wide open / asymmetric follow systems like blogs or Twitter
Honestly, I think stating that Facebook users do not want privacy settings would be grossly inaccurate. Some Facebook users want them while a select few are willing to make their entire lives public. On Facebook you can have it both ways.
Do Developers Want More Data?
Of course! As a developer, a blogger, and a curious individual, I would like total, unfiltered access to everything that everybody in the world is doing. Unfortunately that will not happen as long as we have laws protecting individual privacy rights. Want to see what life is like with no privacy? The movie “We Live In Public” is a great view of what it’s like in a world with no privacy (I’ve embedded a copy below).
If you grant developers access to data, they will always figure out a way to do something with it. Media companies and advertisers will also invest heavily in aggregating and filtering the data that’s available. Unfortunately not all that information is available to developers on Facebook unless explicitly granted by the users. Contrast that with Twitter where just about everybody’s status updates are available for the world to view and accessible via the Twitter API.
At the end of the day, many of us would like access to the most intimate details of every human being in the world (it’s the pinnacle of voyeurism). Unfortunately (or fortunately depending how you look at it), total access to data is something that won’t be publicly available in my lifetime. Facebook understands this and fundamentally supports users’ right to privacy.
Is Facebook Closed?
If you think privacy settings create an inherently closed system then yes, Facebook is closed. If you think that users don’t want privacy settings then you are only fooling yourself. Many users would not like you to aggregate their Facebook status updates without their explicit permission. This is exactly the reason that Facebook Beacon was such a disaster: most users wanted the choice to share their information.
On Twitter there is still a choice: share or don’t share. The vast majority of the time, if you choose to share on Twitter it becomes public. The same is not the case on Facebook. The day that all information on Facebook becomes public is the day that the world has lost all rights to privacy. I would still like to aggregate all of the activity taking place on Facebook but unfortunately that’s not possible. It may never be.
I can do a hell of a lot though: I can aggregate all the activity taking place among “AllFacebook” community members and any other site can do the exact same thing. There may however be a compromise between those wanting data and users who want to maintain their privacy.
Finding A Privacy Balance
One place where Facebook can tackle the privacy hurdle: public profiles. If Facebook provides unrestricted access to public profile data (since they are inherently “public”), developers will be able to get the aggregate information they want while users still get their granular privacy settings. Everybody wins. Earlier today I spoke with Facebook about having session-less access to the status.get method but I haven’t heard back from them yet.
As far as I know (and via my own basic tests), public profile statuses are already publicly available. I even wrote two weeks ago that developers can access “the status updates of many pages that you are not a fan of.” In other words, public profile statuses are already available for aggregation. Do you think aggregate Facebook user data should be available for developers to access?
Facebook’s Privacy settings are what make it a 200 million user platform. The general public feels safe on Facebook. And so, while developers try and figure out how to capture that data, people continue to join. Sometimes, in the techie universe of (relatively) early adopters, we forget that the end user is not always like us– when it hits mass … Read Moremainstream like this, it’s our moms, our kids, and our nursery school friends that are on here…and they are on here to connect– as privately as they want to. Our job, as marketers, is to make information from companies easy, available, shareable and valuable.
Remember the user.
Facebook’s privacy settings are important for the majority of the users, agreed. So, dropping privacy will not help anyone.
Marshall’s suggestion for openness was orthogonal to this though. He suggested keeping the privacy but allow anonymous access to the data/conversations between people. That will make it equivalent to Twitter Search. After all, when we are using Twitter Search to read about Swine Flu, we don’t really much really care who’s writing it.
Facebook thought the key to taking over the web was to create real identities, and thus, they needed serious privacy settings (which I’m not convinced users really understand). Twitter came out with a better idea, that was more in line with the future of the web. Now Facebook is realizing how good of an idea Twitter is, and so they are trying to retrofit Facebook into a bigger Twitter. I think it’s too late. Twitter is growing fast and justifiably so.
Twitter makes the implications of your activity easily understandable, and so, even without privacy controls, it feels less safe. Facebook’s privacy controls do more to coax you to participate in ways that can ultimately get you in trouble than they do to actually protect you.
Twitter has fewer privacy settings, and it has fewer users.
These are probably not unrelated facts, which should probably have been mentioned somewhere in that 2000 words of drivel.
(Also, 99% of those 99% of tweets covered by Twitter Search are useless blather. Why are “developers” so eager to replicate that uselessness with Facebook?)
wow, you frighten me with your thirst for so much info on people. Why? So you can exploit it? So you can revel in it? I don’t get it.
If and when FB decides to drop the privacy settings, I will drop Facebook. It’s that simple. You don’t need to know my thoughts. I didn’t post them there for you. I posted them for my friends and family. Can’t I have a private conversation? I love Twitter too, but I use it when I want to shout something from the rooftops. FB is my place to have relationships with real people. NOT YOU.
I’m really getting sick of this new attitude of Web 2.0 professionals like you have the right to all my content. No, you don’t. And if you take it anyways, we’ll all go away. No more content. No more eyeballs, No more clicks. No nothing.
Despite all the media spiel, I don’t think Facebook has any intentions of totally replacing twitter. There are enough users to go around for both services to co-exist.
Why does everyone ignore that there is a HUGE difference between the two services? I can’t share a photo album with just a dozen people on twitter. There you go. End of story.
Privacy is a huge concern for a majority of users on the internet and Facebook has taken granular privacy controls to a whole different level.
For me it’s exactly the privacy settings on Facebook that make it so appealing. I’m open on Twitter (which I use significantly less) and I’m open on my blogs. The joy of Facebook is that I can share to a specific limited group of my choosing. If that changed, people would bail from Facebook en masse.
Why on earth Facebook sees Twitter as competition I simply can’t understand. I mean, pick up some best practices from the service, maybe, but seriously? Twitter has about a million miles to go to be anywhere as personally valuable as Facebook to me.
“Twitter has fewer privacy settings, and it has fewer users…These are probably not unrelated facts”
You must be a scientist or something. Except… Twitter’s growth rate is enormous right now. And Facebook has been around longer. That might make for a better explanation.
By the way, check out your Facebook news feed and tell us which is more useless. I don’t even bother reading mine anymore.
nice summary of the issues Nick.
still, i’d say there are just as many opportunities as limitations on both/either Facebook & Twitter platforms.
on one, privacy is the default setting, and trusted communication is the opportunity.
on the other, asymmetric follow is default setting, and maximum communication & visibility is the opportunity.
both have benefits & limitations. both are interesting platforms for development, and both provide different but broad distribution potential.
nice to have many options & platforms for both developers and users to choose from… it’s a wonderful world
If Facebook friggs around with the privacy settings I’m gone, gone, gone. You think you have a right to my information bud, well how about I have a right to yours? I have noticed that one of the big sellers is software to block ads. There are laws in place to stop spammers. Are you one of the spammers? If so you may want to change address real quick before the summons arrives. Stop thinking of your wallet and learn to have a little respect for people.
I actually long for better granularity of privacy settings on Facebook. I’d be horrified to be at the Twitter all or nothing approach.
I don’t get it. Why should Facebook destroy Twitter? They are not competing but compelling services: I use Facebook because it’s closed and I use Twitter because it’s open. I can’t see why on earth I would mix them together.
Now here’s a question: if Facebook opens up which social network will jump in and grab all the users who prefer closed profiles? I see a big opportunity here
It feels like people in the blogosphere often forget that the average person uses Facebook to connect with friends and family. Most people are ‘not’ interested in self promotion and collecting followers. Facebook’s privacy settings are a huge advantage, and it was what gave them this huge popularity in the first place.
You are right the privacy settings still need to be there.
This is big step forward, not have likes and comments on items or reply/like was a pain till this came out. They should approach it such that any part of the facebook website should be in the API, for example facebook mail and IM are still closed.
I’m adding inline comments to http://friendbinder.com and the API seems pretty good so far.
as soon as I heard about facebook wanting to open the stream i checked and rechecked my privacy settings. i use facebook to keep up to date with friends and not with business partners nor with the entire planet. So yes privacy controls are essential for fb’s success
I want privacy, I want privacy settings. However, I want the settings to be more comprehensive and less vague. I want to be able to group my friends and restrict friends from another group accessing/seeing these friends (and vice-versa).
I REALLY REALLY cannot get into FB, no matter how hard I try. I just find I don’t have control.
The movie We Live in Public is really good. It’s going to be playing at Silver Docs in Silver Springs soon.
I can’t agree more with the sentiment about the use of Twitter versus Facebook. I connected my Twitter account to Facebook for a few hours. I quickly realized that most of my connections on Facebook wouldn’t understand a 140 ascii character tweet if it landed in their laps, nor will they ever use Twitter. The 800 pound gorilla is Facebook and it’s masses. Twitter fills a void around the fringe. It’s the 80/20 rule with Facebook. 80% want more privacy than is even there today and so they don’t socialize much (look at your friend list, a huge number of them are silent after they initially connect with you). 20% are either ok with the existing privacy on Facebook or have no clue. I agree with the statement about data mining the Twitter public time line, its mostly garbage, most companies that can afford to truly mine it (not the simplistic stuff you see today) can’t react fast enough to take advantage of the findings.
The strong support for privacy was one, very important, reason I opted for Facebook in the first place. It’s the reason I haven’t used anything similar like MySpace, Twitter or whatever. Talking to friends, it’s an important reason for them too.
I must also agree with others that I would like finer-grained and more comprehensive control of the privacy settings. Aggregation, for example, should be opt-in, which I realise will have an impact on the data available to developers.