With Facebook changes, the devil is in the details

Facebook rolled out a few changes earlier this week that had many up in arms about yet another redesign. Turns out that was nothing. Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg used the F8 event last Thursday to announce a slew of new things to come, including a complete redo of the centerpiece profile page that incorporates a new feature called Timeline – your life past, present, and future as a feed. I’ll let you read about all the changes to come but I wanted to add a couple quick thoughts as I digest more of what these changes mean.

In a nutshell: Facebook has had a horrible record on privacy over the past few years, and the more I read about the details the more concerned I get.

The centerpiece of this all is what Zuckerberg called “frictionless sharing” – gulp – which allows folks to share without having to hit a like button or make specific choices to share it with friends. What this mean is that the amount of information being shared on Facebook is about to ramp up big time, which is why the news feed that existed two weeks ago had to go – there simply would be too much information shared and so it had to be replaced with the new .

How is all this extra sharing happening? A combination of OpenGraph, which lets you take your Likes to the Web and connect that to your Facebook page, was a start to this long before the new changes. But now applications and other things you install to your Facebook page will let you make an initial opt-in and then forget about it; in other words, only once do you only give permission to share things you’re reading, music you’re listening to, videos you’re watching. The new interface is partnered with all types of media services, from Spotify to Netflix, and the intention is that all of that will be shared to your page.

Think about that for a second. Maybe music isn’t so bad, but what if you’re watching a salacious video on Netflix and don’t want Grandma to see it? We have laws in place in part because of the right to protect people reading controversial books or points of view; do we really want Facebook to become a place where we can be monitored? Dave Winer compares it to automated stalking, reporting instances of peoples’ visits to Web sites being reported on Facebook walls.

But media you consume aside, that isn’t the most disconcerting news around Timeline. Salon’s Farhad Manjoo pointed out that purchases will be part of this stream. Facebook actually tried this a couple years ago with the ill-fated Beacon, which was turned on with no fanfare and suddenly peoples’ Amazon purchases were showing up on their wall. The backlash was severe and Beacon quickly died, but I still talk about it in Media & Society as an example of how privacy can be tossed aside if we don’t pay attention. And I told my students that Beacon would come back in zombie form; it was an evil-brilliant idea that was a boon to marketers, and for that reason alone it was about as dead as Michael Myers.

So there are elements of Beacon in Timeline, as pointed out, with just a shinier new wrapper. It’s baaaack.

One other quick note. Nik Cubrilovic pointed out that Facebook is actually tracking your browsing even when you’re not logged in.

All of this deserves context. I might give some of these things the benefit of the doubt if they were isolated, but Facebook’s privacy problems are ongoing and the company has a horrible track record. Do we have any reason to trust them at this point that they are just being benevolent? And are we able to keep up with all the privacy setting changes needed to block all of this?

Normally I’m not one of the ones who freak out about Facebook changes. Most of them have been cosmetic over the years, just rearranging content. This is a much deeper plunge into our personal lives and habits, and by itself that isn’t bad if we are opting in. But one opt-in, for all time, isn’t going to cut it.

It’s something Facebook needs to address, and quickly. Otherwise it might be time to start making plans for a life without Facebook.