January 6, 2012

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Privacy in Social Networks

Privacy in social networking is inconsistent and thus confusing.

In private social networks (FB, Path, etc…), the only people that should see your content are the people you explicitly permission as a friend.

But if you write a comment on a friend’s photo, that comment will be seen by all of the photo’s owner’s friends… Which could be tens of thousands of semi-strangers.

Or if your friend comments on your photo, that comment (and corresponding photo) will also reach that friend-of-friend semi-stranger group of people.

If you assume everything you write inside a private social network will be seen by people you don’t know and don’t trust, your content will likely be self-censored and less interesting.

But if private social networks really locked down every gesture and piece of content you make to only your explicitly defined friend network, the serendipity of finding interesting, unknown content to you would be significantly limited.

So private social networks try to walk a compromised line between truly private and semi-public, and the result is an inconsistent mental model for end users about who has permissions to see the stuff you create.

FB at one point tried to solve this problem by creating a mega permission options page with knobs and dials for every type of content that exists in their system. But this is not a solution… It simply pushes responsibility for the problem on to the end user. It is a cop out. It is lazy UX design.

I like the feature in Path where you can see exactly who has seen each piece of content you create. It’s a gentle reminder throughout the user experience how public you are being with the content you’re creating.

But, Path’s solution introduces a new problem… End users aren’t use to having their browsing habits told to their friends. What if I don’t want my friend to know I was browsing their photos on Path, especially if perhaps I have not yet responded to an important email from that same friend. The perception would be that I have time to browse Path but not answer their email?

Reporting my browsing habits inside Path to my friends makes a previously implicit gesture now explicit, which is the same thing FB’s newsfeed did, controversially, 4 or 5 years ago.

There isn’t a clean, simple design solution to the privacy model in social networks. I’m really excited to see how designers tackle this challenge over the coming years.

Comments (View) and 7 notes

7 notes

  1. mattlehrer said: Completely agree. I never want to open Path because of this.
  2. thegongshow posted this

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