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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Everyday I receive an email from somebody about how their account was hacked, how a friend tagged them in the photo and they want a way to avoid it, as well as a number of other complications related to their privacy on Facebook. Over the weekend one individual contacted me to let me know that he would be removing me as a friend from Facebook because he was “going to make a shift with my Facebook use - going to just mostly family stuff.”

Perhaps he was tired of receiving my status updates or perhaps he didn’t want me to view photos from his personal life. Whatever the reason for ending our Facebook friendship, I figured that many people would benefit from a thorough overview on how to protect your privacy on Facebook. Below is a step by step process for protecting your privacy.
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When you log in to a site with Facebook Connect and it prompts you for your email and password, how do you know the site you are viewing is Facebook? This question crossed my mind earlier this afternoon and my conclusion was that there’s little information provided that ensures you are viewing a Facebook page. The only thing that you can see that guarantees you are at Facebook is the URL provided in the browser window (as pictured below).
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Despite ongoing security concerns (the most recent of which is the koob worm), Facebook has been named the number 15 most trusted company in the US. A survey conducted by Ponemon Institute and TRUSTe, the Internet privacy trustmark company, has revealed a short list of what people feel are the most trustworthy companies around, in terms of Privacy Security.

The survey sample consisted of 6,486 adult consumers in the US, and resulted in 706 companies being named. 211 of these companies actually made the cut, including Facebook. So who took the number one spot? American Express, which was in the same position last year. eBay follows as the second most trusted company, with IBM, Amazon and Johnson & Johnson completing the top five.
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Over the past couple years, Facebook has been the subject of many privacy flaws and hackers are continuously generating new methods for phishing user passwords. Today XSSED posted about a new set of cross site scripting vulnerabilities. Now that the vulnerabilities have been posted, Facebook will most likely resolve the issues within hours but it’s clear that Facebook has become one of the primary targets for hackers online. According to Dimitris Pagkalos of XSSED, it’s not even safe to accept friend invitations from people you don’t know. “The reason is that a Facebook profile contains enough personal information which can be studied by fraudsters in order to create special phishing attacks or malware targeted to individual users or businesses.”
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It’s a story that we hear more often than we should. A young teen meets someone online and soon finds out he’s not the man she thought he was. In this case, a 16 year-old girl from Clinton Township in Michigan was raped by a man she met on Facebook, according to a report in the Detroit News. The man, who’s real name is Michael Thomas Robinson, is an 18 year-old member of he Facebook community, creating a profile under the name of Michael Jones.

After befriending him online via Facebook, the girl greed to let Robinson come over her house once, but refused to let him in for a return visit on December 4. Not taking no for an answer, Robinson proceeded to sneak into the house through a basement window, went upstairs and raped the Clinton Township girl, according to the police report. The Detroit News article goes on to report that the rape was interrupted by the girl’s grandmother returning home, causing Robinson to flee the premise. The girl’s grandmother immediately called the police, who were then unable to track Robinson with the K-9 unit. However, Robinson was later arrested at his home on Wednesday.
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Jon Favreau, Barack Obama’s speechwriter, was tagged in a photo of himself groping a cutout of Hillary Clinton on Facebook. The Washington Post was first to report the news Thursday about the future White House speechwriter. When asked for comment on the story, Clinton’s senior advisor said jokingly, “Senator Clinton is pleased to learn of Jon’s obvious interest in the State Department, and is currently reviewing his application.”
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This afternoon I was reading a New York Times article about improving Netflix’s Cinematch video suggestion algorithm. The article is a great overview about the benefits of using consumer activity data for commercial purposes. The more data we have about consumer activity, the more likely we are able to predict their purchase behavior. One thing that is missing from the equation, as the New York Times points out, is the ability to track consumer emotion when they are browsing the web.

In one sense, collaborative filtering is less personalized than a store clerk. The clerk, in theory anyway, knows a lot about you, like your age and profession and what sort of things you enjoy; she can even read your current mood. (Are you feeling lousy? Maybe it’s not the day for “Apocalypse Now.”) A collaborative-filtering program, in contrast, knows very little about you — only what you’ve bought at a Web site and whether you rated it highly or not.

So can’t Facebook or someone on the platform develop an application for judging your emotion based on your Facebook status? Someone once jokingly told me that Facebook can predict whether or not you will break up with your significant other in the near future based on your Facebook activity. With all that data, can’t Facebook also likely tell you what sort of emotional state you are in?
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While John McCain may not be the most technically savvy individual, a bill that he proposed called “Keeping the Internet Devoid of Sexual Predators Act of 2008″ was approved yesterday by President Bush. The bill requires registered sex offenders to provide their e-mail addresses to a national database which is then made available to social networking sites.

This afternoon, Chris Kelly of Facebook announced that Facebook would support this act. While this act is a great step forward, there are definitely a few issues with the law. First of all, the act does not prevent first time offenders from browsing the web and pursuing children. The second issue is that it’s relatively easy to set up multiple e-mail accounts.

One thing that Chris Kelly highlights is that “The penalties and consequences for registrants violating KIDS’ provisions are so severe, we hope they’ll deter potential predators from coming online altogether.” I’m not sure if increasing the severity of penalties will be sufficient but we can at least be hopeful. Ultimately the best step would be automated systems which can predict potential sexual predators within networks.

The only problem with automated systems is that there could be privacy issues and protecting user privacy is one of Facebook’s primary concerns. It will be interesting to see what effect these new policies have in protecting users on Facebook.

As you may already know, Facebook enables users to control what part of their profile friends can see. Through leveraging friend lists and custom privacy settings you can limit access to various portions including pictures, wall posts, personal information, videos of you as well as other sections of your profile. Now Facebook has added a great feature which enables users to preview how their other friends see it.

To view this new feature mouse over “Settings” at the top of Facebook, then click on “Privacy Settings”. Click on “Profile” within the privacy settings page and you will see a box as pictured in the first photo below. Type in one of your friends’ names and it will show you a preview of how they see your profile. This is a great feature for anybody concerned about what certain friends have access to within your profile.

The addition of this feature emphasizes Facebook’s continuing focus on privacy control. While most users probably don’t understand anything beyond your normal profile and limited profile, a decent portion of them may very well leverage Facebook’s granular privacy settings. This is a much welcomed new feature and it’s great to see Facebook continuing to lead the charge when it comes to user privacy settings.