Facebook is pushing a suite of privacy products and tools designed to help users better understand and manage its notoriously difficult-to-understand privacy and security settings.
The company will begin rolling out Privacy Shortcuts, an updated Activity Log, a new Request and Removal feature and educational messaging at the end of the year. The changes are meant to help users better understand and manage their activity and content.
"We really want to avoid surprises for users," Sam Lessin, director of product, told Wired. "We believe there are two fundamental models to do this. One is in-context controls and the second is the framework around Activity Log that allows you to understand what’s out there and let you take action on it."
Topping the list of tweaks is a Privacy Shortcuts. Rather than make you dig through your settings, this feature moves your privacy settings to the top of your Facebook toolbar. At launch, shortcuts will let you manage who can contact you and who can see your posted content like photos and timeline posts. It also will help you block specific people. It sounds like a cool trick that turns what has been a multi-click process into a single click.
Facebook also is revamping Activity Log. The feature, launched a little over a year ago, allows users to track at a glance every action they've taken on Facebook along with actions others have taken involving them. Lessin says that as Facebook grows bigger, the goal is to have people use Activity Log to get a comprehensive view of what's happening with their content. The updated Activity Log now makes it possible to filter through certain content so you can, say, pull up only those photos you've been tagged in or those posts you've liked.
"You can now for the first time have a really easy way to jump to a context that might matter most to you," Lessin says. "Understanding is great, but it’s not great if you can’t always do something about it ... like remove the tag or ask the person [who put it up] to take it down."
That last one is where Request and Removal comes in. It is designed to help users engage in conversations with their social network when they see something they don't want or like on Facebook. For example, if several friends post an unflattering photo of you, the tool will let you select them, de-tag them and send short messages to your friends asking that they take them down. Facebook even provides a list of reasons why you want the photo or post pulled (our favorite: "This makes me sad"). Lessin says the tool has seen an 80 percent engagement rate during internal testing, with those using it taking down the photo or at least responding to the request.
The suite of tweaks includes a small change to app permissions. No longer will third-party apps ask if they can access your information and post to your Timeline in the same instance. Instead, Facebook is breaking it up into two permission requests. That way, users can experience an app before allowing it to share on their behalf.
More privacy tools are always good, but one of Facebook's biggest challenges is making sure users know what's available and how to use it. Given the growth of Facebook product suite, which already includes huge features like News Feed and Photos and mobile apps, this becomes a bigger challenge, Lessin says.
"We have a lot more work to do, we’re not there yet," he says. "But the reality is that the challenge is that we’re going to keep releasing more products and they’ll do new things and if users have to have something more fundamental to rely on. That’s going to be a continuous challenge for us. We’re at this point where we’re trying to create a framework for 1 billion-plus people. It’s a really daunting challenge, but one that we can achieve.... We are going into a new age in a lot of ways and its going to be a long haul."
Facebook is tackling the problem with built-in educational messaging. For example, it will place the Help Center right on the Facebook homepage toolbar, next to the Privacy Shortcuts. And as you're taking different actions, messages will pop up to ensure you understand how that action affects your content. When you hide a tagged post from your Timeline, for example, Facebook will provide a message telling you the post isn't totally gone -- it will still exist in the original user's Timeline, the news feed and other places.
The move makes sense considering how little most people understand Facebook's privacy tools and policies. In November, for example, a wave of Facebook users posted copyright notices to their Timelines in an effort to keep Facebook from owning their content. Facebook doesn't actually own the content. Why hasn't it done this sooner? Lessin said the messaging is part of an ongoing process to improve privacy on the site.
"I think we’ll look back in two years, and ask why aren’t we doing these far more contextual messages than we are right now?" he said. "What’s changing now is that we’re ready and able to have key messaging to consistently reinforce privacy, instead of something we do every once in a while. We’ll keep on getting more sophisticated at this.... We have years of work ahead of us."
