Will Facebook’s new teen privacy settings keep younger users safer?

The newly-announced Facebook privacy settings for new teen accounts may have some positives, but don’t be surprised if it isn’t effective against cyber bullying, but also keeps parents from monitoring their own children’s cyber activities, says one expert.

Facebook’s privacy settings for new teenagers joining the site will at first allow only those the teen has friended to see his or her posts. If users aged 13-17 so choose, they can elect to have their posts public, but the automatic setting is friends-only.

However, will this help keep teens safer on Facebook? Steve Woda, CEO of uKnow.com — a firm that provides social media monitoring of kids’ accounts — doesn’t think these changes will help much.

Woda spoke with Inside Facebook about the teen privacy settings:

Generally speaking, I find teenagers are not great with the privacy settings. We see time and time again, teens making mistakes with regard to such settings. And it’s difficult, right now, for a lot of parents to know if their kids are online. We constantly deal with parents trying to get a handle on this.

One problem, says Woda, is many parents don’t understand social media sites well enough to follow all of their kids’ activities. The downside to the new policy is that not only can it keep such parents away from their kids’ pages, but the internet savvy will understand how to access the teens’ pages.

All of these things are very cool in many ways but also may encourage bad behavior. Parents shouldn’t be afraid of Facebook or Twitter or similar sites, but they need to become highly engaged.

Woda shared these pointers for teens and their parents to keep everyone cyber safe:

1. Insist on transparency. “Parents are in a better position if they take control right away rather than play catch up,” says Woda. Specifically, parents should help their teens set up their accounts including choosing settings. The parents should also have all of the log-in information for their children’s accounts and set limitation and rules that include spot checks of their children’s pages.

2. Remember to block and ignore. Many kids respond almost instantly to messages, especially those that are negative or bullying. Woda suggests that children be taught to ignore such posts and block anyone who continues negative campaigns such as recruiting others to become cyber bullies. Before social media, kids would have a harder time banding together to bully. Now hundreds of kids can pile into such an activity. “It’s important not to be baited into participating,” he says.

3. Remember, it’s not just your kid. Although most kids are not cyber bullies and don’t knowingly post inapppriate content, they may be swayed by others. That’s why it’s imperative for parents to understand the workings of the social media sites their kids use and spot check their accounts. Other times, kids just don’t understand what they’re doing. Woda mentioned a recent client whose daughter was posting photos to a social networking site so that her boyfriend could see them. The daughter didn’t realize that her settings were such that the public could view them.

Image courtesy of Shutterstock.

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Facebook complicates privacy settings and hide users’ email addresses, favoring its own messaging platform

Facebook appears to have hidden users’ third-party email addresses from Timeline, but left users’ Facebook.com addresses visible. It has also added a confusing new setting to the email portion of a user’s contact info.

Although users can choose which of their email addresses are displayed on Timeline and change the privacy setting for each address, it is odd Facebook has hidden addresses that users had previously indicated they wanted to share with friends or the public. This seems like a deliberate move to promote its own messaging service over others, but instead of changing users’ privacy settings to do it, the social network simply added a second setting.

In addition to being able to manage the privacy setting of each email address they have connected to their accounts, users now have another setting to control whether to “show” or “hide” that account on Timeline. This makes it difficult for users to understand which addresses they are sharing. As seen in the example below, the privacy setting for the Yahoo account is “friends,” as it has been for years. The Facebook.com address is set to “only me,” as indicated by the lock icon. But when Facebook added the second setting to the right, it defaulted all non-Facebook.com accounts to “hidden from Timeline” and left Facebook.com accounts as “shown on Timeline.” The social network does honor the “only me” setting so the Facebook.com address is not visible to anyone it wasn’t intended for, but it makes the user experience quite unclear.

In April, Facebook made a vague announcement about “updating addresses on Facebook to make them consistent across our site.” It did not say that it would hide users’ non-Facebook.com addresses. It simply said, “Now, the address people use to get to your Timeline and send you email on Facebook will be the same.” However, users’ Facebook email addresses had always used the same address as their personalized URLs, so this did not seem to be news at the time.

Now Facebook is referencing this press release to suggest that it did, in fact, let users know that it would be making a change to how email addresses appear on Timeline. It provided us and other news outlets with the following statement:

“As we announced back in April, we’ve been updating addresses on Facebook to make them consistent across our site. In addition to everyone receiving an address, we’re also rolling out a new setting that gives people the choice to decide which addresses they want to show on their Timelines. Ever since the launch of Timeline, people have had the ability to control what posts they want to show or hide on their own Timelines, and today we’re extending that to other information they post, starting with the Facebook address.”

However, the ability to decide which email address to show or hide on a user’s profile predates Timeline. Users have been able to do this since as early as 2010. What’s new is the confusing second setting we discussed above. Further, we’ve heard from users that this setting has been live for them since last Monday, if not earlier.

Facebook is most often criticized for revealing too much of user’s information, not for hiding it. But when it comes to email, things get complicated for the social network. In 2010, Facebook and Google were involved in a public dispute over the issue of how email contacts should be used. Facebook would not allow users to export their friends’ email addresses, but it helped Gmail users manually download their Gmail contacts and then re-upload them to the social network. Facebook also allowed users to import their friends’ e-mail addresses when they were using Microsoft or Yahoo services.

We wonder whether Facebook’s latest change to hide email addresses is more than just a way to promote its own messaging feature over third-party email services, and if it could be related to preventing contact importing and exporting. A Facebook spokesperson could not comment on this issue.

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Facebook Settles Federal Trade Commission Charges That It Tricked Users on Privacy Settings

The Federal Trade Commission announced a settlement with Facebook this morning over charges that the social network deceived users by failing to honor privacy agreements.

Under the agreement, Facebook:

cannot misrepresent the privacy or security of users personal information;must get user consent before releasing changes that override existing privacy settings;must prevent people from accessing a user’s material no more than 30 days after that user has deleted their account;has to establish and maintain a privacy program that addresses risks that come with “the development and management” of products and services and that protects the privacy of user’s information;and — within 180 days and every two years afterward for the next 20 — must seek out third-party audits verifying that the privacy program is in place and that it satisfies the FTC’s order.

The agreement comes nearly two years after the American Civil Liberties Union and the Electronic Frontier Foundation raised concerns over Facebook’s 2009 changes to its privacy settings that exposed personal information — namely profile name, profile picture, list of friends, current city, gender, networks, and Pages — to a larger audience than the social network previously allowed. Earlier in 2011, it was reported that Facebook would settle with the FTC over charges that these changes deceived users and violated their privacy — making any changes that retroactively expose user data an opt-in instead of a mandatory change.

At this point, Facebook would have to take pretty intentional steps against the terms of the agreement to cause the FTC to pursue action against it again. In the last year alone, Facebook has also added or changed many features that affect privacy in ways that address the FTC’s complaint — like protecting user IDs from falling into the wrong hands.

In a Facebook response post to the agreement, Mark Zuckerberg says that he feels the platform has a positive track record for providing transparency and control over privacy settings.

“That said,” his post reads, “I’m the first to admit that we’ve made a bunch of mistakes. In particular, I think that a small number of high profile mistakes, like Beacon four years ago and poor execution as we transitioned our privacy model two years ago, have often overshadowed much of the good work we’ve done. I also understand that many people are just naturally skeptical of what it means for hundreds of millions of people to share so much personal information online, especially using any one service.  Even if our record on privacy were perfect, I think many people would still rightfully question how their information was protected. It’s important for people to think about this, and not one day goes by when I don’t think about what it means for us to be the stewards of this community and their trust.”

Zuckerberg also announced that Erin Egan will become Chief Privacy Officer, Policy and that Michael Richter will become Chief Privacy Officer, Products.

During a media call in session with the FTC, Chairman Jon Leibowitz, Bureau of Consumer Protection Deputy Director Jessica Rich, Division of Privacy and Identity Protection Associate Director Maneesha Mithal, and Division of Privacy and Identity Protection Staff Attorney Laura Berger explained carefully that the settlement does not count as a ruling that Facebook violated the law in changing its privacy settings or that it knowingly shared private user data with advertisers. They also stressed that, while this order is very broad, it prohibits any deception about privacy in the future whenever Facebook introduces changes or updates.

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Facebook Adds Game Stories to the News Feed, Privacy Settings to Limit Them

Facebook yesterday announced several changes to how games work on the Platform, including that stories about game may be published to the news feeds of a user’s friends, including non-gamers, when the play a game for more than 15 minutes or complete an in-game objective. Depending on their prevalence in the news feed, game usage and achievement stories could help developers gain new users for free, but could also clutter the news feeds of people who don’t care about games.

To help users avoid annoying their friends, Facebook will add a new privacy setting that allows them to define on an app-by-app basis who an app can share with. The setting will default to “friends” but users can select to prevent the publishing of game discovery, usage, and achievement stories to news feed and the new Games Ticker.

Prior to last September, Facebook apps and games could publish stories to the news feed about users taking in-app actions. While relevant to other gamers and key source of new users for developers, non-gamers often found these stories irrelevant and considered them spam amongst their social content. With this spam threatening to overrun the news feed and drive users away from Facebook, the site closed this viral channel.

Only the occasional story about a friend starting to play a game would appear in the news feed to those that had not already installed that game, significantly cleaning up the feed but also severely limiting organic growth for apps and games. Facebook also tested a randomly occurring Discover New Games sidebar module, but this wasn’t frequently seen and its placement in the sidebar made it much less noticeable than the old game stories that appeared in the news feed.

Without the free growth channel of prominent placement in the news feed, developers were forced to spend more on ads to gain traction for their apps. Combined with Facebook’s 30% tax on Facebook Credits that in July it made the mandatory payment method for virtual goods within games, the Facebook Platform had become much expensive to develop on then a year ago. This led developers to look for alternatives, making Facebook more potentially vulnerable to competing platforms.

Yesterday, Google+ launched its own games platform that only charges developers 5% on purchases made in their game, deeply undercutting Facebook Credits. Facebook needed to make a concession to developers to make its Platform more attractive, and so soon after the Google+ games news dropped, it announced several changes to how Canvas pages and bookmarks work, as well as two new viral channels: the Games Ticker and news feed game stories.

The Games Ticker appears in the right sidebar while users play any Facebook Canvas game, and shows real-time updates of in-app activity by friends. These include:

Game install storiesGame usage stories that are triggered if a user plays a game for more than 15 minutesIn-game activity stories triggered when users surpass a friend’s score or complete an objective, published by  the new Scores and Achievements APIs

When a user first starts using a game, it shows stories about the same game, but as they play longer also shows stories about games they haven’t installed. The Games Ticker should help keep users engaged with a game by informing them of friends who are playing too, and help them discover new games their friends enjoy. Only people who already play games will see the Games Ticker, but this should be a boon for developers since these are the same people who are likely to have a balance of Facebook Credits to spend and be used to sustained engagement with games.

Still to attain the rapid, massive growth that attracted developers to Facebook in the first place, they’d need access to all users, not just existing gamers. So Facebook may now publish the stories listed above as well as posts users opt to fill out and share to the news feed, allowing all users, including those that don’t play games, to discover games from the home page. Previously, news feed stories were only published when a user first started playing. Facebook will only show a gamer’s friends these stories if its algorithm determines they are highly relevant, so users should only see stories about their closest friends.

These stories allow developers to passively leverage their most engaged users to gain installs from their friends. Facebook explains it may be inappropriate to share news of usage of some types of games and apps, such as those related to “more personal behavior such as dating, weight management or pregnancy” and so developers can turn off these discovery stories through a setting in the Developer app.

Users who see unwanted game stories in their news feed or ticker can select to hide future stories about that app or friend. Facebook will use this feedback data to determine how prominent an app’s stories should appear in the news feeds of all users. Those receiving Likes and comments on their posts will gain more impressions, and those frequently hidden or marked as spam will receive fewer impressions.

Users will also be able to prevent game stories about them from appearing in the news feeds or Games Tickers of friends thanks to a new privacy setting that wil be rolled out. Within the Apps, Games, and Websites privacy settings, if users select to edit settings of an app they use, they’ll see an “App privacy” setting. They can select a privacy bucket that “this app can share with”, such as “Friends”, “Friends of Friends and Networks”, or customize settings to”Only Me”, or “Specific People”.

Previously, users could only set a privacy level for all content published by all their apps and games, not a specific game. The app privacy settings can also be reached by clicking on link within an app’s bookmark on the homes page, making it option to restrict distribution of game stories much more accessible.

Considering that it’s difficult for a user to tell how often game stories about them are appearing to friends, users might not use this privacy setting frequently though it’s readily available. This should help games grow without paying for as many ads, but Facebook will need to take extra care only publish highly relevant game stories to the news feed. Otherwise, in an effort to compete with other game platforms, it could degrade the user experience for everyone on Facebook.

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Facebook Adds Game Stories to the News Feed, Privacy Settings to Limit Them

Facebook yesterday announced several changes to how games work on the Platform, including that stories about game may be published to the news feeds of a user’s friends, including non-gamers, when the play a game for more than 15 minutes or complete an in-game objective. Depending on their prevalence in the news feed, game usage and achievement stories could help developers gain new users for free, but could also clutter the news feeds of people who don’t care about games.

To help users avoid annoying their friends, Facebook will add a new privacy setting that allows them to define on an app-by-app basis who an app can share with. The setting will default to “friends” but users can select to prevent the publishing of game discovery, usage, and achievement stories to news feed and the new Games Ticker.

Prior to last September, Facebook apps and games could publish stories to the news feed about users taking in-app actions. While relevant to other gamers and key source of new users for developers, non-gamers often found these stories irrelevant and considered them spam amongst their social content. With this spam threatening to overrun the news feed and drive users away from Facebook, the site closed this viral channel.

Only the occasional story about a friend starting to play a game would appear in the news feed to those that had not already installed that game, significantly cleaning up the feed but also severely limiting organic growth for apps and games. Facebook also tested a randomly occurring Discover New Games sidebar module, but this wasn’t frequently seen and its placement in the sidebar made it much less noticeable than the old game stories that appeared in the news feed.

Without the free growth channel of prominent placement in the news feed, developers were forced to spend more on ads to gain traction for their apps. Combined with Facebook’s 30% tax on Facebook Credits that in July it made the mandatory payment method for virtual goods within games, the Facebook Platform had become much expensive to develop on then a year ago. This led developers to look for alternatives, making Facebook more potentially vulnerable to competing platforms.

> Read more on Inside Facebook.

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Facebook Changes News Feed Settings, Some Users Only Shown Close Friends by Default

Last week, Facebook changed the options in its news feed settings so users either “Show posts from: friends and Pages you interact with the most” or from “all of your friends and Pages.” Some users have unknowingly been defaulted to the first option, causing lot of content to be hidden from them without their knowledge.

It’s not exactly clear what determines which default users receive, though newer accounts appear more likely to only be seeing content from a subset of friends. Previously users could select exactly how many of their friends they saw posts from.

Users can manually configure this setting by scrolling to the very bottom of their news feed and clicking the “Edit Options” link. This brings up the “Edit Your News Feed Settings” window where users can select from the two “Show posts from” options. They can also manage the list of  friends, Pages, and applications they’ve hidden from their news feed by clicking the ‘x’ button next to one of their posts and choosing to “Hide all by [author]“.

Facebook’s news feed settings have become much simpler over the past few years. In 2007, users could manipulate sliders for each type of story to control how often they appeared. In 2008, users could increase or decrease prominence of specific friends in-line from the news feed. Before the current interface, users defaulted to seeing posts from their 250 closest friends unless they increased the maximum.

The reduction in granularity of control contrasts with the increasing granularity available in Facebook’s privacy settings. Facebook may have decided that setting a specific number of friends to see was too arbitrary.

When making the decision of whether to see posts from all or only some friends and Pages, users should think about how often they skim past uninteresting updates in their feed. If its only a few especially noisy friends that are cluttering their feed, they should just hide those users. If they are frequently bored or think there’s too much to read, they should select to only see a subset.

However, if users want the most comprehensive news feed possible, they should go into their settings and ensure that they’re seeing posts from all friends and Pages.

[Thanks to Kellie Mairs for the tip.]

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