Facebook, Now With Fewer Stalker Tools
When I logged into Facebook the other day I immediately noticed massive changes to the interface. The most notable is the Mini-Feed, which allows other users to see lots of your actions, including whose “Wall” you write on, what friends you add, what things you change on your profile, and what comments you leave on other people’s pictures.
While this new information allows hard core users to keep up with what’s going on, it’s a huge privacy concern, especially since these changes were unannounced and displayed actions from before the changes went live.
I immediately went to the My Privacy section of the Website to see what new settings there were for the Mini-Feed. Not a single one.
A lot of users and a lot of other bloggers made a big deal about it, and now, according to an open letter from Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s programmers have been working ’round the clock to implement new privacy settings, which they released today.
Somehow we missed this point with News Feed and Mini-Feed and we didn’t build in the proper privacy controls right away. This was a big mistake on our part, and I’m sorry for it. But apologizing isn’t enough. I wanted to make sure we did something about it, and quickly. So we have been coding nonstop for two days to get you better privacy controls.
While this was a big mistake, I applaud Facebook for a quick turn-around. It took Dell a month to recall those exploding batteries, and it took even longer for Apple to admit that the new MacBooks had issues with discoloration, mooing, and randomly shutting down.
Besides, Facebook is still better than MySpace.