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Mark Zuckerberg is sorry that it’s too confusing to protect your privacy on his social network, and he promises to make that easier.
“The biggest message we have heard recently is that people want easier control over their information,” the Facebook (FB) founder and CEO wrote. “Simply put, many of you thought our controls were too complex.”
The problem for Facebook: Zuckerberg wrote those words in 2010, when he pledged these improvements in a Washington Post op-ed.
Eight years later, a much larger Facebook — with 2.1 billion users instead of the 400 million-plus Zuckerberg cited in that piece — is making strikingly similar assurances. The “It’s Time to Make Our Privacy Tools Easier to Find” headline on its post Wednesday would have fit just as well atop Zuckerberg’s 2010 essay.
The privacy interface does need work
Facebook isn’t wrong to talk about the privacy settings in its desktop site and mobile apps. They look like the product of a series of committees, with some parts showing far more attention to detail than others.
The Cambridge Analytica debacle — in which we learned that a researcher hired by that Trump-linked firm had collected the data of maybe 50 million Facebook users by getting about 270,000 of them to run a personality-test app under false pretenses — has directed a hot spotlight at one of the worst aspects of that interface.
Compared to the corresponding app-privacy settings in iOS and Android, it’s a disaster. There’s no overview showing which apps read categories of data — your friends list, your Likes, your photos — to match what Apple (AAPL) and Google (GOOG, GOOGL) offer in their own Settings screens.
Until a few days ago, Facebook’s Apps settings also included an “Apps Others Use” section. The details there suggested that your friends’ apps were also peeking at your data, even though Facebook shut down that capability in 2015. What was this section still doing in 2018? Facebook’s story: It had meant to get around to removing it.
The other sense of privacy
But the larger failing of Facebook’s privacy user experience is how little insight and control it affords about Facebook’s own collection of data.
If you define privacy as “who can see what I post,” Facebook does very well — its settings governing that represent a model of transparency in a core function that remains incredibly useful at connecting people from afar. But if you define it as “what Facebook knows about me,” the social network turns opaque.
You can get a secondhand sense of Facebook’s understanding of you by visiting your ad preferences (facebook.com/ads/preferences/), which let you inspect and edit the interests that Facebook has discerned from your activity. This page also shows which advertisers have used Facebook’s “Custom Audiences” feature to map their customer lists to Facebook’s data.