Facebook privacy settings, frogs, and scorpions

This is a pic­ture of a scor­pion embed­ded in plas­tic. I’ve had it for about 30 years — grand­mother gave it to me when I was a kid — and I have since passed it on to my 7-year-old daugh­ter. Because, you know, noth­ing says lit­tle girl like scor­pion embed­ded in plastic.

I like this scor­pion because it reminds me of just about every ser­vice provider rela­tion­ship I have. In these rela­tion­ships, pre­dictably, I am the frog, and they are the scor­pion. You know this story, right? From Wikipedia:

The story is about a scor­pion ask­ing a frog to carry him across a river. The frog is afraid of being stung, but the scor­pion reas­sures him that if it stung the frog, the frog would sink and the scor­pion would drown as well. The frog then agrees; nev­er­the­less, in mid-river, the scor­pion stings him, doom­ing the two of them. When asked why, the scor­pion explains, “I’m a scor­pion; it’s my nature.”

When I logged into Face­book this morn­ing, the scor­pion hit me in the face like the hot kiss at the end of a wet fist. New pri­vacy set­tings. Ter­rific. Because Face­book has such a stel­lar rep­u­ta­tion with man­ag­ing pri­vacy. Noth­ing could pos­si­bly go wrong here.

Before I get into any spe­cific advice, allow me to wax philo­soph­i­cal about Face­book itself. From the very begin­ning of the ser­vice, we’ve been con­di­tioned to think of Face­book as a walled fortress. It’s a place for me to keep my group of friends in close con­tact, a place where my rela­tion­ships are shielded from the out­side world, and a place where infor­ma­tion about me is shared only with those I call my friends. Facebook’s pri­vacy set­tings have pushed bound­aries before — giv­ing access to third-party adver­tis­ing part­ners my pur­chas­ing infor­ma­tion and rela­tion­ships — but all this bound­ary push­ing has always been in the con­text of shar­ing that infor­ma­tion with my friends and friends-of-friends, not with the world at large. I am a frog in my own pond.

Then, the scor­pion hollers from across my pond. When I logged into Face­book this week, I met the terms of ser­vice update pop-up. Like most peo­ple, I’m pretty well con­di­tioned to click through those damned things as more of a nui­sance. Regard­ing pri­vacy, how­ever, we the peo­ple tend to read on. When you do, you see that by default, accord­ing to the new terms of ser­vice, all your pre­vi­ously pri­vate infor­ma­tion is now shared on a more per­me­able pub­lic page. In short, that means most of my pri­vate infor­ma­tion will now show up on the web at large — unless I say oth­er­wise.

A few things to define.

More per­me­able. The ser­vice does not give away the farm com­pletely. Pretty close, but not the farm. It doesn’t give away your phys­i­cal address and phone num­ber, for exam­ple, but it does give out your fam­ily rela­tion­ships and bio­graph­i­cal infor­ma­tion.

Web at Large. I don’t believe that Face­book hates peo­ple. Let’s just get that out of the way. But by giv­ing giv­ing out so much more infor­ma­tion out­side the walled fortress, the com­pany is increas­ing by a long acre the num­ber of pageviews point­ing to Face­book pages. More pageviews equals greater ad share. Greater ad share equals more money. More money more often than not gives the impres­sion that com­pa­nies hate their cus­tomers. Damned dirty cus­tomers.

Rec­om­men­da­tions? Sure. First, read care­fully. I’ve gone into my Face­book Pri­vacy Set­tings page and reviewed each of them. Here’s a screen­shot of my set­tings right now:

You can see that I’ve set most of my set­tings to either “Friends and Net­works” or “Friends of Friends” which gives me a broad vis­i­bil­ity inside the Face­book fortress, but only my “About” box and wall posts will show up to the world. I post a lot of good­ies on my wall, and I’d love for more peo­ple to be exposed to them, but I don’t need the world to know my edu­ca­tion, reli­gious views, birth­day, etc.

This move smacks of a new era for Face­book — one in which the com­pany is even more ad-driven, with an equal focus on page views as they have on reg­is­tered users. For us users, that Face­book is becom­ing more of a des­ti­na­tion plat­form for the web, there is a great oppor­tu­nity — more of the words I pub­lish will be vis­i­ble to more peo­ple. Never a bad thing in the com­mu­ni­ca­tions biz. But we have to change the way we think about Face­book, and the way we use it may fol­low.

If you weren’t ready for the change, you feels stung. Make no mis­take, Face­book is a growth-focused com­pany and your birth­day pri­vacy set­tings means pre­cious lit­tle com­pared to mil­lions of addi­tional page views. Just read care­fully and if you’re not sure, ask some­one you trust to help you keep your pro­file appro­pri­ately protected.