Facebook listens to backlash, and changes the ballgame (again)

Mark Zuckerberg, hero or villian?

“We missed the mark” said Facebook founder, and current CEO Mark Zuckerberg on Monday 24 May. Fast forward to Thursday 27^th May, and Facebook have announced their new, improved privacy controls.

Much has been written on Facebook’s privacy calamity lately. Perhaps signifying Facebook’s break into mainstream culture (rather than just a fad), even the New York Times, the BBC and the Washington Post have dissected the issues around Facebook’s open graph, security breaches, advertisers gaining access to user information, and even Zuckerberg’s purported delve into the private email accounts of detractors.

Facebook is here to stay. To give a little perspective, any day now, it will be announced that 500 million people use it. That’s equivalent to the world’s third largest country by population, and is two-thirds bigger than the USA. So it’s not going anywhere despite the recent push to ‘quit Facebook’.

May 31^st has been coined ‘Quit Facebook day’. My Facebook and Twitter streams have been enveloped with a movement of people trying to convince each other to leave the social network. I’ve seen friends arguing about the validity of these calls and there seems to be two sides: those who are saying they want to leave Facebook in protest, and those that are content with the application and want the people ‘who are bitching about quitting’ to either quit, or shut up. Mob psychology at its finest.

While no one can say for sure on the recent attrition rate of late until Facebook make the number of requests for deletion public (and, why would they?), the data is pretty compelling. Facebook is still growing at an astonishing rate. And even if say, 31 percent of people left Facebook in protest over privacy concerns, I’m willing to bet that at least all, if not more, will be replaced by new users signing up.

Why do today’s changes matter?

This amazing infographic (by Matt McKeon) shows the erosion of privacy on Facebook since 2005, when it was a mere college chat site.

If you’re like me and find infographics sexy, this one is the Marilyn Monroe of data visualisation. But, what if the gradual dissipating of walls and rules on Facebook was a response to its very users’ needs, and not simply an agenda by Zuckerberg? What if Zuckerberg is just responding to how people want to interact?

The very nature of ‘social networking’ is to be social. To share information. To interact with networks and people in a new, open way.

And Facebook users share and overshare like no others. From status updates on what they had for lunch, to updates about how much they hate their job, pictures of their kids to pictures of their drunken nights out, regular people are publishing levels of information previously unprecedented, even just five years ago. We have a thirst for information and a thirst to share and Facebook has been very clever in assisting  to quench this thirst.

It’s a chicken and egg situation; Facebook has changed our social fabric, our very way of interacting. Or, 500 million people have joined Facebook because it meets this very need to share?

One example is its Open Graph initiative, perhaps the most exciting opportunity for brands looking for benefits of social media, which was launched in April of this year. Facebook users can choose what they ‘like’ on the web, and share this with their friends. From ‘liking’ a news.com.au article, to a pair of jeans in Levi’s online shop, the rationale is that if someone likes something, their friends are more likely to also like it. So far, more than 100,000 sites have integrated the technology.

Social is now the default

The very idea that social media has become the default, is compelling to anyone looking for a reason to invest in social. Brands, who understand that stagnant, one-way push marketing will no longer influence its audience, are now in the hot seat. Instead, they need to embrace innovation and a truly open experiential mindset, and humanise their offering to leverage this new social web.

That’s why Facebook has been the winner. Even with the backlash on privacy, on its constant changing of settings, on its numerous mistakes in security lapses, and to an extent flying in the face of its users, Facebook is driving the way we interact and use the web.

Zuckerberg’s aim of “making the world more open and connected” (and positioning Facebook as the driver) is being realized. Humans are naturally programmed to be social. To share, to interact and to have our ‘fifteen minutes of fame’.

He said in his op-ed on Monday:

“People want to share and stay connected with their friends and the people around them. If we give people control over what they share, they will want to share more. If people share more, the world will become more open and connected. And a world that’s more open and connected is a better world. These are still our core principles today.”

I’m not sure the new privacy controls will carry this vision through. Yes, they address the complaints – even a 38-page complaint by the Electronic Privacy Information Centre to the US Federal Trade Commission- and will probably mitigate the ‘leave Facebook’ movement.

But what these new controls effectively do is take choice away from Facebook users. We no longer have the capacity to tweak and control every aspect of our privacy. Now, we simply use three blanket control buttons across visibility, personalisation and connection.

Here are some of the biggest changes being rolled out in the next few weeks:

• Facebook currently gives users granular controls over many of the things they share on the site, such as each photo and status update. With the changes, users can apply the same settings to everything with one click, so that they can share with friends, friends of friends or everyone. But for those who want it, the granular controls are also staying.
• There is less information that Facebook makes automatically public. You can now hide your hometown, for example, and the pages for hobbies, books and other interests that you have linked to your profile. These were previously visible to everyone.
• Facebook says it will stop updating its privacy settings so frequently.
• Users can now turn off all outside applications and websites, instead of having to deny them access one by one.
• As it rolls out the changes, Facebook plans to notify users through a message that will appear on their page when they first log in.
• The changes apply retroactively, as well as to new services still to come.

What’s not changing:

• Users’ full name, profile picture, gender and work or college networks remain visible to everyone.

And perhaps one of Facebook’s best assets was choice. You could choose how much or how little you shared, even down to different applications you posted on your wall. Yes it was difficult, and time-consuming to set these controls. But you had the choice and the option to make Facebook suit your differing needs.

At the end of the day, these new ‘simplified’ privacy controls will either make Zuckerberg and Facebook the hero, or kill the very nature of why we love and lap up Facebook in the first place.

Because we now have the option to stop publishing and promoting ourselves to a big, wide audience – will we take it?

~ Karalee Evans, Social Strategy Manager Amnesia Razorfish

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