top | item 1381020

Making Control Simple

72 points| dnaquin | 16 years ago |blog.facebook.com | reply

66 comments

order
[+] mootothemax|16 years ago|reply
Fair play to Facebook, they've done exactly what they said they would, and to the same timeline.

I don't like the long preamble trying to justify themselves, but now that I can turn off Facebook Platform entirely, it's a small price to pay.

[+] izendejas|16 years ago|reply
wouldn't it be great if instead, you could turn it on and it was turned off by default?

give people a compelling reason to use a product (in this case to turn it on), or you have no product--period.

[+] axod|16 years ago|reply
Has anyone else been caught with random popups on facebook "offering" to link your profile interests to public pages?

It's really scammy. Once it pops up, you're trapped. Click on the facebook logo, and it doesn't take you home. There is no way out unless you either agree, or manually go back to facebook.com yourself.

What are they thinking doing crap like that...

[+] jacobolus|16 years ago|reply
Even worse, once you close out of that page a few times and navigate back to facebook manually, at some point they just delete all of your interests, unprompted.

Totally obnoxious.

[+] jayair|16 years ago|reply
Found it incredibly annoying. I haven't visited my profile since.
[+] iamdave|16 years ago|reply
I want to point out, that this entire blog post is dedicated to being able to manage your profile accessibility in a more simplified manner, yet not a single link in the blog post takes users to the direct page in which they can make the changes being referenced. This matters because non-savvy users don't have the slightest of a clue where to edit their privacy settings. When Facebook rolled out their first major redesign, status posts came in by the numbers that people couldn't figure out where to post new pictures, despite having an icon right under the status box that they could have clicked.

Secondly, I just went and checked out the instant personalization feature, which I explicitly opted-out of when it launched, only to find the feature re-enabled.

Things have changed, but nothing changed at all.

[+] indigoviolet|16 years ago|reply
Mark mentioned that they're going to put links to this in messaging on the home page, which is about as in-your-face as possible. Nonsavvy users aren't reading blog posts either.
[+] whatusername|16 years ago|reply
Also - for some of us - the change hasn't been rolled out yet.. I can only see the old privacy page.
[+] expertcs|16 years ago|reply
I don't understand why people are jumping back in the band-wagon. Facebook has shown its intention, clearly. Reverting back is only a temporary solution.
[+] singer|16 years ago|reply
What were their intentions... to trick people with their security settings? Perhaps they just didn't take enough time to plan out the settings the first time around.
[+] izendejas|16 years ago|reply
"If you simply want to turn off instant personalization, we've also made that easier" would read a whole lot better if it read:

"If you simply want to turn on instant personalization, we've also made that easier."

If "personalization" is such a great feature, people will turn it on. "opt in" by default, please!

I see absolutely no changes here, except that privacy settings are now tabbed, and that instead of a dropdown, you now have radio buttons. Wow, now this is simpler! /sarcasm

[+] nano81|16 years ago|reply
Absolutely no changes? Seriously? This lets people control their privacy without needing to go through dozens of granular controls, which is a change. It also lets you completely opt out of platform in its entirety, which is a change. It also no longer requires pages and friends to be public, which is a change. If you want to criticize that's cool, but stick to things that aren't completely false.
[+] noelchurchill|16 years ago|reply
I wonder if anyone who deleted their profiles now want them back?
[+] mootothemax|16 years ago|reply
From what I understand, if you log back in to your account within 14 days* then the delete request is cancelled and everything goes back to normal.

It makes me wonder if Facebook had a bad couple of days of people deleting their accounts and Mark Zuckerberg thought "Right, we've got 7 days to fix this and get them logging in again, let's get to it!"

* I could have the precise timeframe wrong

[+] stanleydrew|16 years ago|reply
This doesn't really change much for me. I'm very happy to have given up my Facebook account. It's more a matter of trust for me, and Facebook ruined that. Their brand is forever tarnished in my eyes.
[+] callahad|16 years ago|reply
There's a 14 day delay between the delete request and the profile actually being deleted. I'd wager that many folks can reclaim their profiles with sufficient ease.
[+] singer|16 years ago|reply
I suppose this might put an end to the Diaspora dream.
[+] keltex|16 years ago|reply
I doubt it. The cat is out of the bag... Facebook can at a whim change the privacy of your personal data. Sure they caved under pressure and took a step backwards, but whose to say things might not change again in the future?

Some people are totally comfortable with the risk, but frankly I think it would be good for everybody that the "social networking infrastructure" is not owned by one company. Then... like email, ISPs, IM, mobile phone providers... everyone would have a choice and companies could compete for their customers.

[+] kilps|16 years ago|reply
I sure hope not - decentralised social networking (whoever makes it) is the only logical way forward. Imagine email was controlled by one company.
[+] xenophanes|16 years ago|reply
Eww, looks they are bundling photos with status and posts (you can see them grouped in the pic). So, to make your posts world readable, your photos have to be too. That's not very good control.
[+] nikolayav|16 years ago|reply
Which is why you can still also access the granular controls and choose different privacy for those items.
[+] mortenjorck|16 years ago|reply
This should deter Diaspora and other open social networking alternatives exactly as much as a monthly decrease in the price of crude oil should deter alternative energy research.
[+] pavs|16 years ago|reply
Since when did Diaspora become an alternative to social network or even Facebook? No one knows what the hell it is, other than a few kids drawing some diagrams on a black board.
[+] singer|16 years ago|reply
Researching alternative energy and actually getting someone to pay for a product that uses alternative energy are quite different. I'm sure those people who are currently using crude oil products will continue to do so once they see the price difference in the alternative energy products.

The same thing goes for Diaspora. It's going to take a miracle to make the majority of Facebook users jump over to a social network that cannot be used for free.