Recently Facebook announced some changes to their privacy settings, intended to provide each user with greater control and less inadvertent sharing of their information. In the short term, what seems to have occurred is greater confusion and more sharing of profile data to the general public. Some of this is the natural friction of changes to a familiar environment and the good that will come out of all the millions of Facebook users confronting and considering their privacy choices is bound to be a good thing.
Tech experts like Larry Magid have provided some insight into what has changed, what you’ll experience and suggestions for what you should select as your settings. I know from my own experience, my privacy settings were already strict, so when I was shown the changes, the recommendation from Facebook was for me to retain my original, stricter settings.
One of the general concerns I have is the suggestion for minors to share your postings (comments, videos and photos) with “Friends of Friends”. It seems like this might cause a more widespread availability of your information than is desirable. Let me share my recent experience.
A major news story broke this week about a California court ruling on the subject of public schools dealing with cyber bullying. The story was a little shocking, not only due to the outcome which found that schools had a absurd burden of proof for a “hostile school environment” but also penalized a school for taking appropriate steps in dealing with a cyberbullying event, since their efforts allowed the victim to feel safe re-entering her classroom. Let’s put that story aside for the moment (but interested readers should see Nancy Willard’s discussion of the topic.)
I was curious to see if I knew friends of the plaintiff or plaintiff child (the accused cyber bully). They live in my neighborhood and the child attended my old elementary school. Stranger things than such a coincidence occur in my life all the time. I turned to Facebook and entered the father’s name in the search box. (The name is available from the court documents and the Los Angeles Times’ story of the lawsuit.) A few suggested Facebook members turned up in the search result, one of them seemed to be the right age for a parent of a young teen, based upon his profile image, and we have two mutual friends.
I clicked on his profile link and could see all his profile information, including a link to the Facebook profile of his child, whose initials and current school year match the information in the story. Clicking on her profile showed me we also have two mutual friends, distinct from those of her father and me. It’s a small world, indeed. And as a “friend of a friend”, I can see all her photos and videos.
That started me thinking about this “friend of friend” model that Facebook recommends by default for minors. I have many hundreds of “Facebook friends”, 608 to be exact. Some of them are genuine friends and family members, others business and industry contacts. I took a random selection of 10 of my Facebook friends (from the most recent entries in my Newsfeed and averaged their friends’ lists. The average is 443 friends. From a casual review of my children and their friends, it’s not unusual for a minor to have 500 to 1,000 Facebook friends.
Assuming for the sake of establishing a maximum that none of my friends’ friends are duplicates of my own, this means the audience for my friends of friends is nearly 270,000 people. Thinking about our children, and the hundreds of photos and videos they are publishing to Facebook, do we really want them distributed to more than a quarter of a million people? Given this estimate (and please correct my math if it’s wrong), I highly suggest you put your privacy settings to just Friends and show your children how to do the same. To do so, you’ll click on the Privacy settings at the top of your Facebook page, then click on Profile to adjust the setting for a variety of information groups, including photos and videos.