At some point in history, a brilliantwoman person invented the concept of “spring cleaning,” to force people to give their home a thorough scrubbing at least once a year. As Facebook rolls out its new profile page design called Timeline, it’s hoping to force its 800 million users to do something similar: a “privacy cleanse” of their digital homes.
Facebook spokesperson Meredith Chin took me on a tour of her own Facebook Timeline page yesterday. Facebook employees and developers already have access to the new design, as do those eager to try it out who took advantage of a hack-around. Chin tells me that one million people have already activated Timeline. As for the rest of us, Facebook says it’s coming “soon,” and indicated that it’ll likely be available within a month.
Timeline is intended to shift your Facebook profile page from the current “snapshot of you” to something akin to a scrapbook of your entire life. It will surface what it perceives to be your most important Facebook activity (based on likes and comments) from the entirety of your time on the site, with an easy year-by-year guide on the side to sort through the timeline. And yes, the guide does include a spot for “born” — time to start uploading your baby pics.
“We wanted a way to showcase the big moments,” said Chin. “It’s a return on investment for what users have put into Facebook over the years.”
That may well be, but some people are also a bit freaked out at the idea that their accounts are about to be mined for the juiciest stuff. Facebook has learned some privacy lessons. Instead of forcing this on its users all at once, it’s initially inviting them to turn the feature on, and is then giving them seven days to curate the Timeline before it goes “live” for other people to see. (It’s an “invitation” for now, but eventually you’ll have to get on board. Facebook will flip the switch on everyone’s accounts at some point, probably within a year. “It’s too hard for developers to work with two different types of code,” says Chin.)
Giving people a week to curate is important, because Timeline may surface things you had forgotten you had put on the site — some of those things may make you nostalgic and some of those things may be reputation-threatening (E.g., “Wow, didn’t realize I was tagged in those photos from last year’s Halloween party where we made fun of people whose homes had been foreclosed!”). That’s the privacy cleanse aspect of this. Forcing users to curate their Timelines on the site will make them go back and review the privacy settings on photos, videos, and status messages they posted to the site years ago…
“Someone may have made their party photos viewable to their friends in college, when all of their friends were fellow students,” says Chin. “But now their friends include their boss and co-workers, and they may not want those people to see their drinking photos.”
In other words, by surfacing your old activity on the site, Facebook will be showing you what your current friends have access to. So make sure to take some time to do that curation before hitting “Publish now.” (Of course, the downside is that old activity is being surfaced and will be easier for them to see if you don’t curate.)
Before it was fairly difficult to see all of your old activity on the site, without scrolling back forever on your wall. But along with Timeline, Facebook is introducing an “activity log” tool, visible only to you that will allow you to see everything you’ve done on the site, sortable by date — making it easier to go back and delete old status messages, for example.
Something that stood out to me as a possible privacy concern, though, is a new “map” feature that’s going to be part of Timeline. This will innocuously put pins on a global map showing places that you’ve previously lived. It will also, though, map any other geolocation information you’ve inputted on the site. Starting this summer, Facebook started offering people the option to include geolocation with their status updates and photos. One Facebook employee had over 250 spots tagged on her San Francisco map, for example. Aggregating all of that information into map form can be pretty revealing as to where you go on a regular basis, and which parts of town you can be found in.
As for things from the past that are painful surfacing, Chin tells me that engineers have programmed Timeline so that it won’t note when you friended people who you have since de-friended or been de-friended by (so this little trick won’t work) and won’t surface marriages and relationships that have since ended, though even as we sat there, another Facebook employee commented on 2006 photos of him with his ex popping up. Even Facebook engineers can’t completely rewrite the past for you.
Mark Zuckerberg said recently that the company is trying to make privacy controls easier for users. I see that effort here, but it’s hard to make controls easy as people put more and more information on the site, connect with more and different types of people, and as the site continues to change its designs. As I’ve said before, good luck!
Via: Forbes
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