Out-Law News 2 min. read
17 Nov 2010, 3:37 pm
Facebook has faced criticisms in the past about the way it deals with users' privacy. It has changed the default settings on users' accounts to make them more open and more likely to share information, prompting a furious backlash from users.
Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg told a press conference earlier this week that the system would take on some of the attributes of email, instant messaging and text messaging.
Facebook said that users will be able to change the privacy settings on messages so that only messages from friends or friends of friends were even delivered.
The system will be able to accept messages from outside of the Facebook messaging system if a user signs up to have an @facebook.com public email address.
Even then, though, messages can be rejected based on who sent them. "Only emails from people that fall within the message privacy setting you choose will be delivered to your Facebook Messages," said a company statement."For example, if you select the 'Friends Only' setting, you will not receive messages from email addresses that we can't confirm as belonging to one of your friends. Instead, those senders will receive automatic bounce-back replies."
"It seems wrong that an email message from your best friend gets sandwiched between a bill and a bank statement," Facebook's Joel Seligstein in a blog post. "It's not that those other messages aren't important, but one of them is more meaningful. With new Messages, your Inbox will only contain messages from your friends and their friends. All other messages will go into an Other folder where you can look at them separately."
"Messages is built for communicating with your friends, so it made sense to organize primarily around people," he said. "All of your messages with someone will be together in one place, whether they are sent over chat, email or SMS. You can see everything you've discussed with each friend as a single conversation."
Critics of Facebook's past approaches to user privacy will be assessing the system closely. The company has fallen foul of regulators and pressure groups over its changes to the default settings that many users do not change.
Canadian Privacy Commissioner Jenifer Stoddart closed an investigation into the company in September over concerns that it had breached Canada's privacy laws. A month later the company announced measures designed to increase the control users of Facebook had over their privacy.
Augie Ray of research firm Forrester said in a blog that Facebook was being careful around privacy because it knew that it had ground to make up when it came to consumer trust.
"Facebook announced it will not utilize the content of users' personal messages to target advertising," he said. "This is surprising, considering doing so is typical among web-based email clients; both Gmail and Yahoo Mail scan users' email messages for keywords in order to better serve relevant advertising."
"At some point Facebook may do so as well, but not now. Why not? Because Facebook knows it has to earn more trust. Its size and increasing importance to consumers’ private communications means it has to proceed with caution at monetizing consumer data. For now, Facebook is content to have more people spend more time sending and receiving messages, and that means more page views, ad impressions and revenue," said Ray.
Technology consultant Charlene Li said in another blog post that Facebook would be able to track vital information through the Messages system.
"Facebook already very effectively mines profile data to better place ads, but limits the data used to what the user already enters on their profiles. In the future, Facebook could (and I emphasize could) understand when people are asking for advice, and if they acted on it, thus mapping influence," said Li. "While Facebook has not plans to do this in the future, privacy advocates are standing at the ready to understand how that data will be used."
