For a long time now there has been an issue surrounding Facebook users’ ability to permanently delete their accounts. While users were able to remove their information from the site, it wasn’t extremely clear to users how they could delete their accounts. The new clarification is a result of a complaint filed by the Canadian Privacy Commission.
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Yesterday afternoon Facebook posted about more detailed abuse reporting features now being provided for users. Facebook wants to protect those users who experience or witness “bullying, harassment, unwanted contact or offensive behavior”. That’s why the company is rolling out much more granular reporting features. Users can select from “nudity or pornography, drug use, excessive gore or violence, attacks individual or group, advertisement or spam or infringes on your intellectual property” when reporting violating images.
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As a result of a new privacy agreement with Canada, Facebook has issued statements suggesting that there could be major platform changes ahead for developers. In a blog post this morning, Ethan Beard suggests that users may have to explicitly opt-in to granting profile information. This news comes as Facebook is under increasing scrutiny from privacy advocates including the California ACLU chapter which has released a new quiz application to inform users of what data applications have access to.
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This afternoon Facebook is hosting a privacy call to update a few press members about the company’s latest changes. With a lot of confusion about what exactly is taking place, the company wants to make some clarifications as the changes will have a significant impact on the user experience. We’ll begin updating this post as the call begins.
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This morning, Washington Post writer Kim Hart reported on Facebook’s addition of a lobbyist to represent the company on issues primarily related to privacy. The new lobbyist doesn’t exactly comes from a position in which he argued against large internet company’s ownership of private data. As Hart writes, “Timothy Sparapani, former senior legislative counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union, argued that Internet companies have too much control over consumers’ data. The self-described ‘privacy zealot’ didn’t join Facebook until seven months ago because he was uneasy about revealing personal information on the site.”
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Yesterday the Financial Times reported that European privacy regulators may place tighter restrictions on the type of personal data that’s shared with third-party developers. The argument is that users don’t understand what information is being sent when they install an application. One US privacy advocate in the article is quoted, “Users don’t know their information is being collected and used.” While I’m not quite sure about what users are aware of, it’s also clear that the privacy advocates don’t have a clear understanding of how things currently function.
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Yesterday afternoon Facebook posted about how the site is growing beyond regional networks and how networks will no longer be part of the privacy settings. The rationale is that the company has grown beyond it’s previous boundaries and as such, “these networks too often represent large geographical areas—sometimes entire countries—that no longer accurately reflect people’s real-world connections”.
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Yesterday Facebook released an updated version of their friends page to let users more effectively manage their relationships. While some users were frustrated with the changes (as usual), the new design empowers users to more efficiently manage their many groups of friends. While most users have played with Facebook’s friend lists feature, many have still yet to master the feature. We’ve decided to create a comprehensive guide that outlines how you can take advantage of friend lists to manage relationships and how to make Facebook privacy management much easier using friend lists.
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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.
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Yesterday while answering questions from reporters, Mark Zuckerberg made it fairly clear that users will soon be able to decide whether or not information they share is public or private. Currently on Facebook, “public” for most items means to display information among your friends and in the rare instance information among your network and even sometimes to Google.
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