FYI.

This story is over 5 years old.

Tech

Don't Freak Out About Facebook's New Privacy Policy Yet

Ballyhooing the inevitable transition of Facebook: That Fun Thing From College to Facebook: That Evil Corporation Stealing Your Soul isn't a very helpful exercise if you actually use Facebook.

In the face of deafening protest, Facebook pulled the trigger on its latest round of updates to its privacy policy on Wednesday. This was after the social network made the generous gesture of allowing its users to vote on the impending changes, and a gesture is all it turned out to be. You see, Facebook's little experiment with democracy was only binding if at least 30 percent of all the social network's one billion active users voted.

Advertisement

In the end, a total of 668,872 users cast votes, 88 percent of which opposed Facebook changing its existing privacy policy. And while that figure is much more than what's needed to project a statistical outcome for the entire population, it was over 299 million votes short of Facebook's minimum requirement. Throwing out the results, Facebook ended its voting experiment and put the new privacy policy in place the next day.

Those are the broad strokes of what everyone is pissed off about -- and bold strokes they are. In the same swipe, Facebook sent its users a message that their vote, yay or nay, didn't matter to the company when it was deciding the fate of their data. It also reiterated the fact that privacy stands to change as the social network expands and acquires more companies. Facebook's Instagram purchase, for instance, informed the design of the new privacy policies, as Facebook tries to string together its various properties and products. Skeptics would be quick to say that Facebook always owned your data and always will, so complaining about the changes they make is inevitably futile. Skeptics are right, too.

Ballyhooing the inevitable transition of Facebook: That Fun Thing From College to Facebook: That Evil Corporation Stealing Your Soul isn't a very helpful exercise if you actually use Facebook. And let's be honest -- most of us do at one point or another. In this common case, it helps to know what Facebook is actually changing in its privacy policy, why they're changing it, and how it affects you. Generally speaking, the changes aren't that dramatic, and most of them actually make it easier to understand who can see what in your profile. So don't freak out about the differences. Not yet, anyway. It'll take some time to see how these tweaks really affect how Facebook works.

Advertisement

First, let's talk about the actual changes. Once they've kicked in for everyone, you'll notice a new icon on the righthand side of the menu bar. Click it and you'll find "Privacy Shortcuts," which essentially let you jump to specific parts of your privacy settings. There, you can manage how your various posts behave and who gets to see them, as well as control who can contact you. None of this stuff is new, but it is a lot easier to access. What is new, though, is the inability to hide oneself from public searches. Facebook said that not many people used this option -- though I doubt that -- and the social network is probably happy to show more listings in its directory.

On top of those two big ones, Facebook has peppered in a number of smaller tweaks. You can now view the history of any type of update on the social network and more easily sort content based on who can see it. So you could ostensibly check out all of your public updates, flip a switch and see all of your private ones. Yippee. Bulk editing of things like photo tags is the last major change and perhaps the only thing that doesn't send you into the maze of Facebook's privacy settings. And yes, they're still a maze.

This brings us to the reasons Facebook made the changes. Quite broadly speaking, these changes give users more control and more access to their privacy settings. It used to be really effing hard trying to figure out how to make sure your mom couldn't see the photo album from that time you and your girlfriend went to Bonnaroo. Now it's a little less hard. (That does not, however, mean it's easy.) This should make users happy, because people always like to be able to reach the levers that control their experience. "Surprises are fundamentally bad," said Samuel Lessin, one of Facebook product czars. "We're taking the most critical things and putting them in context across the whole site."

It might also be read as a precursor to something bigger. Going back to Facebook's $1 billion Instagram purchase and Instagram's recent addition of web-based profiles, we can start to imagine a more integrated future, one that connects your various online identities under one umbrella. A ton of startups have tried to do this in the past few years from FriendFeed, which Facebook bought, to RebelMouse. It's inarguable that Facebook has the power to make it happen, even if it only brings together Facebook-owned profiles like those on Instagram. Eventually, Facebook will want one privacy policy that applies to everything. That is, if Facebook does head down this path.

So how does this affect you? Well, the good news is that you will indeed get a few more levers to pull on your Facebook profile. If you've been hiding from everyone by making yourself invisible in search, get ready to go public. And if you think that Facebook is done dictating how its users use its products, think again.

Images via Flickr and Facebook/AllThingsD