Last week we asked readers to submit questions about Facebook and its approach to privacy, which Elliot Schrage, vice president for public policy at the company, had agreed to answer.
We sifted through roughly 300 questions left by readers on our original blog post and our New York Times Facebook page and e-mailed a selection to Mr. Schrage. His answers appear below, after some general remarks. In some cases we shortened the questions and fixed typos.
Elliot Schrage, vice president for public policy at Facebook.First, I want to thank the New York Times for hosting this exchange. I also want to thank everyone who offered constructive comments and questions about information sharing and user control on Facebook. This is a good opportunity for Facebook to listen to and learn from an important group of users.
Reading the questions was a painful but productive exercise. Part of that pain comes from empathy. Nobody at Facebook wants to make our users’ lives more difficult. We want to make our users’ lives better. Our mission is for Facebook to be the best place in the world to connect and share with friends
and family.
Another painful element comes from professional frustration. It’s clear that despite our efforts, we are not doing a good enough job communicating the changes that we’re making. Even worse, our extensive efforts to provide users greater control over what and how they share appear to be too confusing for some of our more than 400 million users. That’s not acceptable or sustainable. But it’s certainly fixable. You’re pointing out things we need to fix.
We’ve worked hard to educate our users about changes to, and innovations in, our products. Facebook users receive notices about our new products and whenever we propose a change to any policies governing the site, we have notified users and solicited feedback.
Clearly, this is not enough. We will soon ramp up our efforts to provide better guidance to those confused about how to control sharing and maintain privacy. Anyone interested in these topics should become fans of the About Facebook Page and the Facebook Site Governance Page — two valuable sources of information that already provide regular updates to more than 8 million users. We will also expand the education information in our Privacy Guide to offer much more specific detail on these topics. Additionally, other upcoming announcements will dramatically improve how we communicate about change.
At the same time, we will work to make our settings easier and simpler. Our desire to innovate and create new opportunities for people to share sometimes conflicts with our goal to create an easy and accessible user experience. We work hard to serve innovative and conservative users alike. But it takes forums like this to get better ideas and insights about your needs.
My biggest concern reading these comments has been the incorrect perception that we don’t care about user privacy or that we’ll sacrifice user privacy in exchange for advertising. That’s just not true. We want to be trusted partners with our users in helping manage those tensions. You’ll see below answers that show just how serious we are about doing that.
If Facebook is going to succeed — and we will — it’s not going to be because we think our definition of privacy and user control is better than yours. It will be because we’ll do the best job of responding to your questions and concerns about privacy and information control. We may not always agree about the speed and comprehensiveness of our response but I’m here because I’m confident Facebook’s future success depends on our ability to respond.
Real simple one: Why can’t you leave well enough alone? Why do I have to do a weekly ritual of checking to see what new holes you’ve slashed into the Facebook Security Blanket, so that I have to go and hide or delete yet more stuff? Are Facebook customers really pounding on your door screaming that they want more categories of their personal data to be available to marketers every few months? –David, Urbana, Ill.
We know that changing Facebook — something people have demonstrated is important to them — can be unsettling. But we’re always trying to be better and do more for our users. Clearly, we need to rethink the tempo of change and how we communicate it. Trust me. We’ll do better. The second part of
your question reflects what is probably the most common misconception about Facebook. We don’t share your information with advertisers. Our targeting is anonymous. We don’t identify or share names. Period. Think of a magazine selling ads based on the demographics and perceived interests of its readers. We don’t sell the subscriber list. We protect the names.
It used to be that I could limit what strangers saw about me to almost nothing. I could not show my profile picture, not allow them to “poke” or message me, certainly not allow them to view my profile page. Now, even my interests have to be public information. Why can’t I control my own information anymore? –sxchen, New York
Joining Facebook is a conscious choice by vast numbers of people who have stepped forward deliberately and intentionally to connect and share. We study user activity. We’ve found that a few fields of information need to be shared to facilitate the kind of experience people come to Facebook to have. That’s why we require the following fields to be public: name, profile photo (if people choose to have one), gender, connections (again, if people choose to make them), and user ID number. Facebook provides a less satisfying experience for people who choose not to post a photo or make connections with friends or interests. But, other than name and gender, nothing requires them to complete these fields or share information they do not want to share. If you’re not comfortable sharing, don’t.
What caused the controversial glitch; what are the chances of it recurring? — Geovanni C., submitted via Facebook
We added some code that had the unintended consequence of the glitch. We messed up what was supposed to be a maintenance upgrade. We phase changes and test them before they go live for real users to detect any potential issues. During code pushes, our engineering, user support, and operations teams work cross-functionally to monitor the state of the push and to identify problems early. No system is perfect and no company avoids errors all of the time. We are committed to investigating all mistakes and to learning from them. We’ll make mistakes in the future but, I hope, fewer and less significant.
What are Facebook’s legal liabilities should any critical information be leaked and misused?– Geovanni C., submitted via Facebook
There are state, federal and international laws and case precedents that you’d need to examine to answer that question. It would require more space than we have here. But, really, our fate is in the hands of our users. We’re held accountable by the people who use our service. When they disagree with our decisions, they let us know. Our track record of responding to those concerns is pretty good. We know that if you lose trust in Facebook, our cool new products won’t matter.
Has Facebook ever considered asking us, the hundreds of millions of users who make money for them, what we would or would rather not have? You know, sort of like asking the customer what they would prefer? — Ricky P., submitted via Facebook
We agree it’s really important to solicit feedback and ideas from our users. We’ve created tools to help collect and organize these suggestions. It’s linked to from the front page of the help center. We regularly go through review these suggestions and they’re typically excellent. We also use focus groups. We ask about Facebook and have them try out ideas. Finally, and most importantly, we’ve developed tools to test new ideas on parts of our user base. For example, we tried out dozens of variations of our December transition on more than one million people. The version we rolled out to everyone was the result of those tests.
What is the long-term plan to monetize Facebook’s huge traffic, and how will that impact user privacy? — Rachel W., submitted via Facebook
Advertising. Sponsorship. I think people still ask because the ads complement, rather than interrupt, the user experience. They think, “That can’t be it.” It is. The privacy implications of our ads, unfortunately, appear to be widely misunderstood. People assume we’re sharing or even selling data to advertisers. We’re not. We have no intention of doing so. If an advertiser targets someone interested in boats, we’ll serve ad impressions to people with ‘boats’ on their profile somewhere. However, we don’t provide the advertiser any names or other personal information about the Facebook users who view or even click on the ads. Anonymized demographically targeted ads work. We like them. You should, too. As a result, advertisers are willing to pay to reach this audience without needing personal data.
What’s the actual, real-life-applicable upside for the Facebook user of any of the recent changes you’ve made to privacy settings? How do they make the site better for me? — T., San Francisco
Social plug-ins are a great example of how these changes can benefit our users. Social plug-ins were designed with individual privacy protection in mind. Right now, they are enabling social experiences on more than 100,000 Web sites without sharing a single piece of data with them. Go to CNN.com, washingtonpost.com (and soon, I hope, nytimes.com) to see what articles your friends have liked and shared on the homepage. I’ll bet one of those articles will interest you, too. To some understanding the upside involves thinking about information in a different way, like we did with our instant personalization pilot. I encourage you to read tech blogger Robert Scoble’s post about it. He nails the real-life-applicable benefit when he says of our test with Pandora, “I have found more music in the past week than I’ve found in the past year.”
I’d like to ask Elliot, and all the senior staff at Facebook, what are the privacy settings for their own personal Facebook accounts? Can you share the settings (not your personal data, obviously) with the NYT and Facebook users? –Scott Berkun, Seattle
Not surprisingly, Facebook senior staff reflect a broad cross section of preferences for sharing and privacy. Because my role is more public, there’s already lots of information about me on the internet over which I have no control on Wikipedia, in news stories and blogs and in other places. These sources include lots of information I might prefer to have private, such as my e-mail address, but I don’t have the power to prevent that information from being available online or in a search index. Perhaps as a result, I use my Facebook profile for more personal information, and take advantage of our controls to target what I share. I’m open to accepting Friend requests from acquaintances and messages from everyone, but I generally restrict my sharing to Friends and members of the Facebook network at work.
Mark takes a different view. He’s more restrictive about which friend requests he accepts, but he’s more willing to share information about himself and what he’s up to with anyone who visits his profile. You can see how my and Mark’s profile differ by checking them out. The settings of other members of our senior management team generally fall somewhere between Mark’s and mine.
Why not simply set everything up for opt-in rather than opt-out? Facebook seems to assume that users generally want all the details of their private lives made public. – abycats, New York
Everything is opt-in on Facebook. Participating in the service is a choice. We want people to continue to choose Facebook every day. Adding information — uploading photos or posting status updates or “like” a Page — are also all opt-in. Please don’t share if you’re not comfortable. That said, we certainly will continue to work to improve the ease and access of controls to make more people more comfortable. Your assumption about our assumption is simply incorrect. We don’t believe that. We’re happy to make the record on that clear.
I love Facebook, but I am increasingly frustrated by the convoluted nature of the privacy settings. It’s clearly within Facebook’s ability to make the privacy settings clear and easy to use — why hasn’t this been a focus? — Ben, Chicago
Unfortunately, there are two opposing forces here — simplicity and granularity. By definition, if you make content sharing simpler, you lose granularity and vice versa. To date, we’ve been criticized for making things too complicated when we provide granular controls and for not providing enough control when we make things simple. We do our best to balance these interests but recognize we can do even better and we will.
What happens when an account is deleted? Do one’s posts on walls, photos, and fan pages remain visible on the site? How long does user data remain on your servers? — A., Texas
You can either deactivate or delete your account. When you deactivate, your profile information and content (photos, videos, etc.) are immediately made inaccessible to others on Facebook. However, this information is saved in case you decide to reactivate later. Some people leave Facebook for
temporary reasons and expect their information and content to be there for them when they return. Messages you’ve sent or Wall posts you’ve made remain, but your name appears in black unclickable text (since your profile no longer appears on Facebook).
If you never want to use Facebook again, you can delete your account. Deletion is permanent, and the account can’t be reactivated. When we process your deletion request, we immediately delete all personal information associated with your account. Messages and Wall posts remain, but are attributed to an anonymous Facebook user. Content you’ve added is deleted over time, but isn’t accessible on Facebook, and isn’t linked with any personal information about you.
How can I easily see what people who aren’t my friends but are members of Facebook see about me in my profile? –Mike Kelly, Bainbridge Island, Wash.
You can see how your profile looks to the world by clicking “Preview My Profile…” on the Privacy Settings page or by clicking “Everyone” in the tool on our Privacy Guide.
Also, what of my information is being indexed by search engines? –Mike Kelly, Bainbridge Island, Wash.
Search engines can always index the public information that helps your friends find and connect with you: your name, profile picture, gender, and any connections you’ve made, which include your friends, Pages, and networks. They can also index any content (photos, videos, etc.) that you’ve set to Everyone. Search engines cannot index any content with a more restrictive setting (for example, Friends, Friends of Friends, or Friends and Networks).
Your public search listing is a public version of your profile that’s indexable by search engines. You can choose not to have a public search listing from the Search privacy page. However, your public information and content you’ve set to Everyone may still be found in searches.
Why must I link to a page for my school, job, or interests and make them public, or delete the information entirely? — Absolutely Not, Chicago
It turns out that less than 20 percent of users had filled out the text fields of this information. By contrast, more than 70 percent of users have ‘liked’ Pages to be connected to these kinds of ideas, experiences and organizations. That is the primary reason we offered the transition — because it reflects the way
people are using our service already. While we see tremendous benefit to connecting to interests, we recognize that certain people may still want to share information about themselves through static text. That’s why we continue to provide a number of places for doing this, including the Bio section of the profile. In these places, just as when you share a piece of content like a photo or status update, we give you complete control over the privacy of the information and exactly who can see it. However, we know we could have done a better job explaining all of this and you can expect to see new materials on the site soon. I’m sorry we didn’t do a better job
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