This article originally appeared on May 8,2010. Since then, Facebook has announced that it will be revising its privacy policies again, in response to an uproar in the press and online about exactly what Qualman writes about here. As of this posting, we haven’t seen the details of that revision or the feedback, but the entire incident is a lesson in 21st Century PR for the rest of us.
If you have an opinion on this subject, I’d love to hear from you in our comments area (bottom of this article).
Perception is reality. Social Media has taken us from Word of Mouth to World of Mouth. The biggest benefactor to date has been Facebook. Ironically, this new found speed of information dissemination may cause Facebook’s eventual downfall. It helps items go from perception to reality faster than you can say “status update.”
Much of Facebook’s success has been its simplicity. MySpace allows you to customize your page and they have oodles of banners to put money into their coffers, but as we’ve seen play out this muddies the waters a bit too much for the general user. Facebook on the other hand, kept items so easy to use that their user numbers skyrocketed as a result of dads and grandmothers joining in the fun:
- More than 400 million active users
- 50% of our active users log on to Facebook in any given day
- Average user has 130 friends
- People spend over 500 billion minutes per month on Facebook
Yet, when it comes to privacy, Facebook seems to continue to struggle. Going back a few years to their launch of Facebook Beacon. This tool allowed other Facebook friends to see which purchases you made online. For example if I purchased David Meerman Scott’s latest book it would alert my Facebook friends of this purchase. This is a very helpful thing, the point where Facebook stumbled is they opted every user into this tool. One famous story was the young man that purchased a diamond ring for his soon to be fiancée. Since they were connected on Facebook she was alerted of this purchase; probably not the romantic setting they had in mind.
Today, as reported by Nick Bilton of the New York Times, Facebook’s privacy policy is longer than the U.S. Constitution. The U.S. constitution has a paltry 4,543 words to Facebook’s 5,830. While Facebook is trying to give their users the freedom of choice on how they “want” their specific privacy, most users just want something that is easy and safe to use. When downloading a piece of software, how many of us click on the “advanced” settings? Not many, just give me the default and give me comfort in knowing that is the right choice.
I believe Facebook is smart enough to restore this comfort and restore it soon. If they don’t, it could be their eventual demise. After all, perception is reality, and their own tool can definitely hyper-accelerate perception into reality. Ironic, isn’t it?
