Social networks have long focused on how to balance individual privacy concerns and controls with how to create as much value for the audience. Facebook has long been saying that two of their key distinguishing traits are that users are “real” – i.e. they use their real name and have their real friends as their social graph – and that they provide a deep level of privacy controls. I’ve long wondered whether people really used any of those privacy controls at all.
First to the “real friends”. Perhaps this was true when Facebook first started and was growing. But I receive more and more “cold calls” via Facebook; people friending me whom I’ve never met before but who are trying to network and make connections. What does this do to the sanctity of the social graph?
Another interesting trend I’ve seen is how many people come out of the woodworks from the past – people you went to elementary school with. Suddenly the new feed looks like HS all over again, except oddly enough people who were never friends in HS are suddenly buddies on FB.
On the privacy front, a brief sampling of my friend’s and relative’s FB usage indicates that most people don’t appear to go beyond the defaults. Only a few of the people I asked used even the “limited profile” list in FB, let alone created their own arbitrary lists of friends. The ones that did such things were exactly who you’d expect – digerati adapt at using technology for marketing.
So how much do those features matter to the mainstream? Perhaps they are just like a comfort blanket. You might not ever use the privacy controls yourself, but you like knowing they’re there in case you change your mind. But it’s nice to know that Facebook has finally gotten around to simplifying their piravacy settings. Maybe now I’ll be less lazy about using them…
