If you are a regular Facebook user, you will have noticed that they upgrade the privacy features a couple of weeks ago. We were given a much wider ability to select what we want to expose publicly and to whom. Of course, some people were annoyed because the default setting if you took no action was to make everything you do public. I am not sure why people had an issue with this because Facebook was nice enough to give us the benefit of a more sophisticated privacy model and their choice was either to make the default mode either everything public, or everything private. I suspect had they made everything private, there would have been outrage that they were “blocking” things from being public.

There are two interesting lessons to learn from this move by Facebook. The first is that no matter what you do as a servicer of over 300 million people, someone is going to complain. In comparison, there are about that many people in the U.S. and we cannot agree on anything in this country so it should be expected that Facebook will have critics from now on. The only difference is that they have a few people making decisions at the top, whereas the U.S. has hundreds that have to agree on even the smallest changes. I suspect that Mark Z is finding it an interesting experience/responsibility to be at the helm of Facebook at this point.

The second thing to learn from this privacy update is the concept in general of allowing users to have complete discretion by service or media type as to what goes public and what goes private. This caught my eye because I had an immediate picture in my head of what I would like to see the technology industry move toward, and frankly, what I think they will do over time. The simplest way I can explain it is that we should get an ability to right click on any file, program, or media type and select from a scale of privacy ratings. Think of it this way, I right click a picture on my computer and set it for private, friends and family only, specific users access, or open access. Once I have set that privacy rating, it carries through anywhere I send or upload this document, picture or video. I would have to have an ability to administrate my privacy groups and ratings on my operating system as well so I could specify friends and family and such.

Other options I would love to have are things like an automatic obfuscation capability on the private files so that once I tag them as such, they are scrambled on my computer so they cannot be accessed even at a low level. I would like to be able to change my privacy ratings by application so I could have files that might be private on Facebook, but available to friends and family on Flickr. I would like to be able to bulk change privacy ratings by folder, or drive so I can manage them all at once. Actually the list goes on and hopefully you have the idea.

I guess my point is that this move by Facebook is just a baby step towards what we need to have as users in order to be more sophisticated about the security of our content. I am sure we will look back ten years from now and realize we were in the dark ages with privacy in 2009…

Scott Klososky
Scott@klososky.com