Dear Facebook,
For a year I’ve been asking my mom to join facebook so I could easily share pictures of my girls with my family. I was even planning a blog post called “Mom, Why You Have To Join Facebook”. Her biggest concern was privacy and security and I would explain to her that with the right settings she could make her account very secure.
Then you had to start making it nearly impossible to make an account secure. It’s not the I mind the million different settings you have to click on to lock down an account. That’s annoying but I could have easily created an account for her. It’s that you will not let an account stay secure. We have a perfectly good secure account and then you role out a new feature and leave the privacy settings on it wide open.
Take the new location tagging service. Gizmodo reports that the default setting is friends can tag your location. Thank you for making it so no random stranger can tag me but do you really think I want anyone announcing where I am except me? Imagine one friend typing the simple “Bumped into so-and-so when leaving 1st St offices.” and another friend reading that and realizing “Wait that’s her OB’s office. I bet she’s pregnant!” The wrong tag in the wrong place and something that’s supposed to be private is suddenly not.
So how does this apply go getting my mom on facebook? Well, while I’m happy to do the annoyingly complicated process of setting up her account I don’t want to be a long term facebook privacy administrator. So I make her account safe and a week later you release yet another feature where friends can do X. Either I’m monitoring everything and keeping her account safe or sooner or later her privacy will be violated and it will be my fault for saying “Hey, facebook is safe!”
So facebook, if you want to see my mom start using your product or anyone else a little (rightfully) privacy nervous you need to fix your policy. You need to post a stated policy that new features are always locked down and we have the option of turning them on for friends or the world. Until you make this safe I’m going to have to tell my mom, “Yes you are right. Don’t worry I’ll keep emailing you the pictures.”
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
Perfect post and oh so true!
This is exactly why I am not on facebook…well, one big reason anyways. EVERYONE keeps nagging me, but it’s not going to happen. After my wedding, people I didn’t even know had seen pictures of our big day before my husband and I did thanks to friends posting their own personal pics of the wedding on facebook. That REALLY ticked me off. It’s a total invasion of privacy from many angles. Good post!