The privacy implications of Facebook’s new ‘frictionless sharing’ and profile redesign are terrifying
Photography: Thos Ballantyne
You may have noticed a couple of new features on Facebook recently. Listen to a song on Spotify, and it’ll immediately be posted to the news feed for all to see (and mock). Similarly, read an article on the Independent or the Guardian and they will be added to a persistent list of ‘recently read articles’, publicly comparing your reading habits to others.
This is ‘frictionless sharing’, Facebook’s latest initiative in their mission to track every last detail of our lives. Articles and songs are only the beginning: TV shows watched on iPlayer, goods bought from Amazon, or maybe even the photos you take on a smartphone could be added automatically to your news feed. All with permission, of course, but when was the last time any of us stopped and read the small print before clicking ‘accept’?
There are certainly benefits to these new features. After all, we all share on Facebook the things that we’re enjoying, whether it be songs, articles, or funny cat pictures. But we carefully curate this information, picking out only the best stuff or – more importantly – things that we feel represent us. I don’t want everyone to know that I’m listening to Justin Bieber, or that I’m reading reviews of the new Twilight film (neither of which are true, by the way).
I’m not usually the sort to be bothered by Facebook’s regular makeovers, but these new features – introduced by Mark Zuckerberg at the company’s annual ‘f8’ event – go further than ever before in attempting to catalogue our entire lives.
‘Frictionless sharing’ is the first step, but in a few months’ time our profile pages will be changing to a new design called ‘timeline’. Every status, photo and event that you’ve ever interacted with online is presented in an interactive timeline, allowing you – or any of your friends – to zip back in time to see what you were up to in, say, June 2008.
This information has been on Facebook all this time, of course, but currently it’s fairly difficult to travel back further than a couple of months. With the redesign, you can even travel back to before you originally joined the site – all the way to the day you were born – and add in details of your life. As well as standard statuses and photos, the redesign adds a selection of ‘life events’, which include “learned an instrument”, “lost weight”, “first kiss”, “military service”, and weirdest of all, “lost a loved one”.
Even without these, ‘timeline’ gives a scarily accurate snapshot of any specific moment of our lives – well, assuming you’ve been moderately active on Facebook for the past few years. It’s a brilliant piece of design, and teams of hundreds must have worked day and night to get it working. But the implications for our own personal privacy are terrifying. Oh, and it will eventually be compulsory, so savour your old profile layout while you can.
Why does Facebook want this stuff, anyway? There are two reasons – to ensure that we have a reason to keep on coming back to their site, and also to give to advertisers. It’s easy to forget, while tagging last night’s pictures from Sinners, that the more Facebook knows about each of us, the more direct their advertising can be. There’s a reason why the site is free to use: the advertisers are Facebook’s real customers. We are merely the product being sold.
Personally, I couldn’t care less about targeted advertising; it’s the idea of strangers, or even just moderately close friends, being able to see elements of my life I no longer feel comfortable sharing. I don’t want new friends or colleagues to see soppy messages from ex-girlfriends, or political rants I no longer agree with. Or that awful striped shirt I used to wear. Yeuck.
Can we do anything about the direction Facebook is now heading in? Not really – too much time and money has already been spent for the company to do an embarrassing about-face. We can be careful with what we post in the future, but with ‘frictionless sharing’, we no longer even have to make a conscious decision to add to the website’s ever-growing database. We can delete all of our old photos or cancel our accounts, but that’s painful – and Facebook is still a useful social tool, with few competitors (even Google have struggled to break into the market with their own version, Google+, despite its supposedly superior privacy features).
Regardless, it’s time now, particularly for students soon to enter the professional world (like me), to reconsider just how much personal information we intend to share online. Facebook may call it ‘friction’, but I can think of another word for what these new features are removing: control.
We’re all trapped in the social network now
Posted November 21, 2011
The privacy implications of Facebook’s new ‘frictionless sharing’ and profile redesign are terrifying
Photography: Thos Ballantyne
You may have noticed a couple of new features on Facebook recently. Listen to a song on Spotify, and it’ll immediately be posted to the news feed for all to see (and mock). Similarly, read an article on the Independent or the Guardian and they will be added to a persistent list of ‘recently read articles’, publicly comparing your reading habits to others.
This is ‘frictionless sharing’, Facebook’s latest initiative in their mission to track every last detail of our lives. Articles and songs are only the beginning: TV shows watched on iPlayer, goods bought from Amazon, or maybe even the photos you take on a smartphone could be added automatically to your news feed. All with permission, of course, but when was the last time any of us stopped and read the small print before clicking ‘accept’?
There are certainly benefits to these new features. After all, we all share on Facebook the things that we’re enjoying, whether it be songs, articles, or funny cat pictures. But we carefully curate this information, picking out only the best stuff or – more importantly – things that we feel represent us. I don’t want everyone to know that I’m listening to Justin Bieber, or that I’m reading reviews of the new Twilight film (neither of which are true, by the way).
I’m not usually the sort to be bothered by Facebook’s regular makeovers, but these new features – introduced by Mark Zuckerberg at the company’s annual ‘f8’ event – go further than ever before in attempting to catalogue our entire lives.
‘Frictionless sharing’ is the first step, but in a few months’ time our profile pages will be changing to a new design called ‘timeline’. Every status, photo and event that you’ve ever interacted with online is presented in an interactive timeline, allowing you – or any of your friends – to zip back in time to see what you were up to in, say, June 2008.
This information has been on Facebook all this time, of course, but currently it’s fairly difficult to travel back further than a couple of months. With the redesign, you can even travel back to before you originally joined the site – all the way to the day you were born – and add in details of your life. As well as standard statuses and photos, the redesign adds a selection of ‘life events’, which include “learned an instrument”, “lost weight”, “first kiss”, “military service”, and weirdest of all, “lost a loved one”.
Even without these, ‘timeline’ gives a scarily accurate snapshot of any specific moment of our lives – well, assuming you’ve been moderately active on Facebook for the past few years. It’s a brilliant piece of design, and teams of hundreds must have worked day and night to get it working. But the implications for our own personal privacy are terrifying. Oh, and it will eventually be compulsory, so savour your old profile layout while you can.
Why does Facebook want this stuff, anyway? There are two reasons – to ensure that we have a reason to keep on coming back to their site, and also to give to advertisers. It’s easy to forget, while tagging last night’s pictures from Sinners, that the more Facebook knows about each of us, the more direct their advertising can be. There’s a reason why the site is free to use: the advertisers are Facebook’s real customers. We are merely the product being sold.
Personally, I couldn’t care less about targeted advertising; it’s the idea of strangers, or even just moderately close friends, being able to see elements of my life I no longer feel comfortable sharing. I don’t want new friends or colleagues to see soppy messages from ex-girlfriends, or political rants I no longer agree with. Or that awful striped shirt I used to wear. Yeuck.
Can we do anything about the direction Facebook is now heading in? Not really – too much time and money has already been spent for the company to do an embarrassing about-face. We can be careful with what we post in the future, but with ‘frictionless sharing’, we no longer even have to make a conscious decision to add to the website’s ever-growing database. We can delete all of our old photos or cancel our accounts, but that’s painful – and Facebook is still a useful social tool, with few competitors (even Google have struggled to break into the market with their own version, Google+, despite its supposedly superior privacy features).
Regardless, it’s time now, particularly for students soon to enter the professional world (like me), to reconsider just how much personal information we intend to share online. Facebook may call it ‘friction’, but I can think of another word for what these new features are removing: control.