Eat My Business

Wow - Yesterday I wrote about how to change your facebook profile picture to make it more private and less-googleable.

I had no idea that Facebook’s privacy change was going to cause such a storm. The gist being that it is now difficult, if not impossible,  to have an invisible account.

Its affirming to know that I am not the only one who found the new settings a bit annoying.

I did not rant yesterday when i wrote-up my how-to guide on making your profile pic private. I won’t rant today either.

However, since there might be many millions of people taking action in response to these new privacy changes, I thought I should detail some of the actions that I took in response them. Then, try to predict and outline some of the consequences that are likely if, as it seems, many other people are doing the same thing.

1. Profile Picture
   • Precondition: User unable to prevent their profile picture from being displayed to the World.
   • My Consequential User Action: Faking a profile picture - I switched to an impersonal image as soon as I realised that it was public.
   • If everyone else does the same: This might explain why lots of your friends on facebook start using weird (or even weirder) pictures as their profile pictures.
2. Friends List
   • Precondition: It seems as if a user is unable to prevent their friends list from being displayed to the World.
   • My Consequential User Action: I seriously considered closing down my Facebook account. Started looking for alternative places to keep in touch with my friends, share photos and feel in the loop without having to stick my self on a podium for the World to see. The only thing holding me back is the fact that i will lose all my Facebook connections if I move somewhere else.
   • If everyone else does the same: I suppose a niche has been created for a Facebook-like website that does NOT force you to publicise yourself to the World.
   • Updates: I have just found out how to hide your friends list from your public profile.  However it is a crude setting that also prevents the list from being shown to your friends.
3. Fan Pages
   • Precondition: It is not obvious how to prevent your list of fan pages from being displayed alongside your public profile.
   • My Consequential User Action: I do not like the public knowing that i am a fan of the “Leather, Milk and Filing Cabinet Fetish Scene”. Furthermore, I could not be bothered to read up, find or fine-tune the privacy settings for ”fan pages” so I just used a sledgehammer. That is, I went through my list of fan pages and stopped being fans of everything.
   • If everyone else does the same: If you are an owner of a ‘fan page’ - it would be interesting to see if there has been any noticeable reduction in the number of subscribers to your fan page since the facebook’s new privacy changes.

I suppose the probability that the ‘extrapolated aggregate consequence’ will actually occur depends on how many other people react in the same way as I did. If it is just a minority - then this post is wasted.

I have a feeling that people will throw a tantrum  over the next few weeks, lock down their profiles, delete stuff and then start adding it again after all the fuss has died down.

Add a comment and let me know whether or not you reacted in a similar way.

Updates:

Well this person seems to be finding the whole thing a bit tricky. If I had a Yahoo account I’d help the poor mite out:
* See: New Facebook Privacy Settings? its so complicated.?

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 10th, 2009 at 6:17 pm and is filed under social networks, facebook, privacy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.