Facebook Blog

I think Charles is right to be concerned about the current state of privacy in social media, but I take issue with his statement that facebook is deliberately making it harder to make your content private. If you click on Privacy setting in facebook today the first thing you're greeted with is a big control asking you if you want your profile to be public /friends/custom. But first you have to care enough to click on it.

Building social network privacy controls is not an easy problem b/c people don't want to do the extra work that's involved in setting privacy on things that they post AND it's confusing. Most people just don't want to choose a circle for their 300 fb friends.

Facebook has gone through many iterations of privacy controls - https://blog.facebook.com/blog.php?post=391922327130 goes into some of that history. Some of them even included google circle-like functionality for privacy. No one used them.

I'm not saying that these controls couldn't be improved, but the point here is that privacy controls take work from users. Until society as a whole is aware of these issues (and Girls Around Me does a great job of it :), people aren't going to invest the time to do it.

TL;DR - building privacy controls are hard. The industry as a whole needs to improve them, but society also needs to learn to care about their privacy so they actually use what's available to them.

I believe this has to do with the privacy changes last month, which made it so that Friends Lists can no longer be hidden.

After an initial backlash, Facebook made it relatively easy to remove your friends list from public search results, but it sounds like it isn't actually blocking access to them — they're just harder to find.

From Facebook's blog post ( http://blog.facebook.com/blog.php?post=197943902130 ):

"In response to your feedback, we've improved the Friend List visibility option described below. Now when you uncheck the "Show my friends on my profile" option in the Friends box on your profile, your Friend List won't appear on your profile regardless of whether people are viewing it while logged into Facebook or logged out. This information is still publicly available, however, and can be accessed by applications. "

Interesting. I wonder if Swiftype uses Apache Lucene/Solr/Nutch as backend.

Facebook is listed as Client. They have a contract with Microsoft (Bing) and have at least two internal search engines. One of them is the type-ahead one as explained there:

https://blog.facebook.com/blog.php?post=369584442130

https://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=389105248919

I assume FB uses Swiftype not for the main FB website, maybe the developer documentation or some PR sites. (They use(d) even some SharePoint sites for business pages).

EDIT: Yes, Swiftype is based on Lucene et al: http://www.quora.com/Swiftype/What-is-the-technology-stack-behind-Swiftype

"Mr Zuckerberg said that developers had "worked weekends, camped out in the conference centre" in order to overhaul its privacy settings."

Just like they did back in september 2006 when Zuckerberg said:

"I wanted to make sure we did something about it, and quickly. So we have been coding nonstop for two days to get you better privacy controls."
http://blog.facebook.com/blog.php?post=2208562130

Maybe they should reiterate first, listen to feedback and suggestions (like youropenbook.org), draw out, a/b test privacy settings pages, offer more transparency in the process and -then- start finalize coding their 'best' way to control these.

Keep in mind that these "groups" are different from the previous version of groups that facebook use to have.

You get a notification when added to a group and can easily leave with one click. Groups are private by default which means that nobody outside of the group can see your private groups or any of the content.

This has made facebook a lot more interesting for me. Essentially it's a great way to have private discussions between my close group of friends without broadcasting to all my "friends".

The facebook blog has a video overview: http://blog.facebook.com/blog.php?post=434700832130

There was a comment that struck me as a little odd, and a lot revealing, in the official Facebook announcement by Joel Seligstein (http://blog.facebook.com/blog.php?post=452288242130):

I'm intensely jealous of the next generation who will have something like Facebook for their whole lives. They will have the conversational history with the people in their lives all the way back to the beginning: From "hey nice to meet you" to "do you want to get coffee sometime" to "our kids have soccer practice at 6 pm tonight." That's a really cool idea.

Cool, yes, but also a little spooky.