More Changes to Facebook Privacy, and More to Come

Yesterday, Facebook announced two new features: Community Pages and “connections” for certain profile information. The first combines some of the generic fan pages that have become popular over the last few months with Wikipedia articles to create a sort of social encyclopedia. I’m not entirely clear on what Facebook envisions with this feature, but it will be interesting to watch it develop.

The second feature, however, has attracted much more attention, and rightfully so. I’m again still sorting through details and have not yet seen the new connections in action, but certain parts are pretty clear. Facebook is replacing the manual lists in parts of the “info” tab on your profile to lists of fan pages you connect with. Along with the new setup, Facebook is changing the “Become a Fan” buttons to “Like” buttons. If you want to connect with a page for something you’re interested in, you now will simply “like” the page.

In a blog post, Facebook spun the connections as an exciting improvement: “Instead of just boring text, these connections are actually Pages, so your profile will become immediately more connected to the places, things and experiences that matter to you.” I can see three main reasons why Facebook would make this change, and none of them involve text being boring.

First, this helps software more easily process your interests. With textual lists, you may find titles such as these under a user’s favorite movies: “LOTR,” “Lord of the Rings,” “Lord.Of.The.Rings,” “***Lord of the Rings!***”, “i just LOVE lord of the rings so much,” etc. It’s obvious to a human that these all refer to the same trilogy of movies, but not to a computer. By essentially turning sections of your profile into database relationships, Facebook can take all of these disparate descriptions and replace them all with a link to an official Lord of the Rings page.

Second, the shift to “liking” reduces friction. The semantics may be subtle, but I’m sure Facebook has done research on this. “Liking” implies a simple, casual gesture (represented by the thumbs up icon), while “becoming a fan” or “subscribing” carries more of a commitment and desire for further interaction. I’m guessing users are far more likely to say they “like” something than “become a fan” of it, and Facebook wants users to connect and share as much as possible.

Third, this increases the useful data Facebook can offer to others. It’s likely that a large majority of Facebook’s users currently have privacy settings that only allow friends to see the “boring text” in their profiles. But since last fall’s privacy changes, connections to fan pages are now considered publicly available information. By taking the simple step of “liking” a page, users will add an easily processed connection that certain sites and applications will be able to access when visited.

Since the new setup has obvious privacy implications, Facebook added privacy controls, but unfortunately, they seem to also add further confusion. As Facebook notes, the new settings relate only to profile visibility: “You can control which friends are able to see connections listed on your profile, but you may still show up on Pages you’re connected to.” This is yet another example of Facebook making information appear to be private without actually making it private. As TechCrunch writer Jason Kincaid put it well, “In short, this section is about the data on Facebook that you can’t actually control. You can make it harder to find, and even hide it from your profile, but you can’t remove it entirely.”

Facebook stands to gain enormously from users embracing these new profile connections, and fan pages within Facebook are only the beginning. Tomorrow is f8, a developer conference hosted by Facebook, and the company will likely be introducing several new features and plans, such as adding location information to wall posts. Inside Facebook has an excellent round-up of what to expect. Several of these changes will likely have a significant impact on user privacy; I expect we’ll hear more detail about pre-approved Facebook Connect sites gaining automatic access to user data. Another item of interest will be the Open Graph API, which takes the “liking” behavior described above and extends it to any website.

That means that rather than simply say you’re a fan of Social Hacking, for instance, you could potentially “like” theharmonyguy.com. In other words, you could create a connection between your profile and a given URI (website address). That opens up many new possibilities, but once again adds significant information to your public profile.

As I said, certain details are still not clear to me; for instance, Facebook seems to have backtracked on whether your list of friends is publicly available information, and says that fan page connections will not be public for minors. I’ll certainly be watching to see what Facebook announces tomorrow, and will likely have much more to say about it in the next week or so. (In fact, I’ve been holding off on a few posts until I see how the f8 announcements will impact the issues they deal with.) I should also have shorter, quicker updates throughout the day tomorrow on my Twitter feed.