

Absurd Complexity of Facebook Privacy Settings - minalecs
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2010/05/12/business/facebook-privacy.html

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nfnaaron
I made a comment the other day about this being facebook's UX failure. This is
a pretty damning illustration. How could they burden their users with
something like this?

Nothing but a maze of twisty little passages.

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philk
I can't help but wonder whether it's complex by design so people will stick
with the defaults.

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nano81
The websites chosen to compare Facebook's privacy policy to are ridiculous.
Facebook operates in more countries, has far more users, and has more products
than any of those other websites. Of course the privacy policy will be longer.
Honestly, it's pretty amazing they can keep the length at only 5x Twitter's
when their product has orders of magnitude more features and services. The
comparison to the constitution is silly for the reasons discussed in the other
thread: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1342711>

There is certainly room for improvement with the UI and organization of the
controls, but that's not an easy task when so many granular controls are
available. Honestly, all this Facebook privacy hysteria is getting a little
out of control. There are legitimate issues, but there is also an absurdly
high amount of band-wagonning and me-tooing from otherwise intelligent people.

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richardw
I dunno. I'm a developer and I should know how to drive software. When I
distrust the UI enough that I'm not sure if I've pinned down my privacy, then
they're failing. I guarantee most of my friends don't know what they're
sharing.

I think they should have "everyone / friends of friends/only friends" options
as a default selection, with an advanced option if you really want to dig
around. [Insert user-tested improvement here.] At the very least, you should
be able to see every privacy related option on one page, not a tree of pages.

Also, when they add extra 'features', FB should stop switching new privacy
settings to the least secure options! It's like whack-a-mole - you have to
check them every so often just to see what Zuck has come up with while you
weren't looking.

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richardw
I also think they should add a principle to their privacy approach: "surprise
the user as little as possible". While this isn't easily attainable, it is
something to strive for.

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mrvir
Facebook interface issues are silly. The privacy settings are made confusing
deliberately. They have plenty of talented people and could fix this quickly
if they would want to. IMO the root problem is not interface design.

