In: General

How Facebook could have avoided all the fuss

Facebook Privacy issues have been all over the News, in the Blogs and all over Twitter for some time now. If you use Facebook it’s hard to avoid the issue and chances are you know at least a little about all the chatter. There’s one way Facebook could have avoided all this fuss a long time ago.

Facebook could have avoided all the fuss a long time ago by having a clear Privacy Policy, there Facebook could have outlined exactly what data they wanted to be public. This Policy could have been outlined very early on and each new user would have had to accept it as part of the registration process. The user then knows from the outset which data will be held publicly for searches or advert targeting, and then the user has a choice – accept and use the site or reject and go elsewhere.

After the user has made their choice accepted the Policy and entered the site proper the settings should be simple, usable and use an ounce of common sense. Each post, update or upload is posted to only friends of the user, posting is then clear to everyone “your posts are only seen by the people you choose to be friends with”. Of course your application would also need an override to change the entry from private to public status, and it’s important that the User Experience happens in this direction. This is where common sense comes in: no one wants the hassle of selecting ‘make this private’ every time they want to hide information, what’s far more intuitive is selecting which entries you wish to be public.

Some barriers are good

Yes One’s first objection will probably be that this adds a barrier to entry. Yes it does. This barrier is one Facebook should want; only users who accept or don’t care enough to read the Public Policy become their user base. Facebook would then be free to use the agreed data for any purpose they have outlined openly in the Policy. This totally eliminates having any type of heated community banter over privacy, as long as you stick to your own outlined rules – which brings me on to my next and final point.

Be consistent, don’t go pulling the rug from under your users every six months. No one’s saying you shouldn’t change and evolve your rules with the community and the world at large. People like stability, users are people. Move to a flexible Policy change cycle, once every eighteen months with a period of consultation before the start of the next cycle. Stability  alone isn’t going to cut it though, constancy is needed also. Flip-flopping between Privacy directions, radically changing interface controls or changing Policy definitions is not being consistent. Again, evolution is expected with software and internet applications so change is not an outlandish idea, gradual, intelligent, user friendly changes are paramount. A user shouldn’t have to work to understand an application’s Policies, the application should work to make it’s Policies usable and communicative. I believe the average user is far more accepting than most think, if things are out in the open and clear to understand I think Registrations would be on par.

Enough theorizing, Facebook doesn’t really have any of those options anymore. Not unless it would be willing to rewrite some base Facebook Policies, lose some users along the way, eat a whole lot of humble pie and be willing to take an extended time to rebuild trust in it’s products and data use.

Think like a person

Be clear, be consistent  and be usable. Plan for your data use from the start, anticipate and avoid the Facebook backlash.

Posted: Thursday, May 27th, 2010
Tags: facebook, ideas, openness, policy, privacy, user-experience