A slap in the Facebook
September 8, 2006 — It’s been the news on college campuses everywhere this week: the massive, college-based social network Facebook released their Feed functionality on 5 September with much internal revelry, improving the homepage interface with a stunningly creepy feature: an at-a-glance, timestamped activity monitor. Now, Facebook tracks your every move, from profile changes to their posts on friends of friends’ walls. Want to see when your Facebook crush breaks up with his/her significant other? No need to click on that profile link — it’s automatically announced on your front page. Want to know just what was “recently updated” in your friend’s profile? No need to guess, since Facebook Feed tells you exact edits. You now know anything and everything going on in the lives of your friends and acquaintances, thanks to big brother Facebook.
At first glance, the Feed functionality made me more than slightly uneasy. I have over 300 Facebook “friends”, the majority of them off of the Michigan network and unknown to me, thanks to the tens of friend requests I get in a given day from people reading about my Facebook XSS exploit I had constructed back in April. All of these random people now had every move I made on Facebook publicly announced to them on their home page. I felt much less like a user and much more like I was being used.
I wasn’t the only one paranoid of these changes, though, which were made available with no way to censor them or turn them off. Hundreds of thousands of Facebook users revolted in both on-site and off-site protests, claiming that the new features made Facebook a prime tool for stalked and other creepy undesirables, morphing a fun social networking application into the best information-gathering tool for socially inept spies and campus paparazzi (okay, maybe not so much the latter.)
I had to sit back and think this over: Why would Facebook do this? After the initial shock had worn off, my rationality returned: from an interface-design perspective, these homepage feeds are absolutely amazing. It solves the primary user problem of data overload, intelligently converting mere data into information, giving a Facebook user instant access to the most relevant information within their network of friends. No more browsing through friends’ profiles for hours: there’s really no reason to. You know what you need to know about the people you (supposedly) know, with nary a single click other than the one required to log in.
The lesson learned
In the meantime, however, Facebook presented us with a vital new piece of knowledge for designing solid social networking tools and applications: we have found the interactive threshold in which people become socially uncomfortable when presented with increasing computative capabilities. We’ve reached the point of where information retrieval and processing actually turns users away from using the service.
Before Feed, such a line hadn’t been crossed previously. Those studying the social media phenomenon were amazed at what users would give out given fields to input data into. Social users gave contact info, interests, and massive autobiographies to anyone who wanted them. Users uploaded thousands of photos of them, their friends, and their lives. People dated each other, sight unseen, from Internet descriptions. People went from information protectionists to information exhibitionists nearly overnight, giving their lives away to anyone interested enough to look, regardless of the motives of those looking. There was seemingly no end to it.
Meanwhile, those with the ability to build tools like Facebook Feed “stalked” user profiles by tracking revisions, spidering friends and friends of friends for metrics data, and sold social network activity data to advertisers. Usage statistics would be stealthily track by shady user tools as well as networks themselves, long before Facebook’s Feed functionality was even mentioned. If the data existed, chances are that it was spidered. End of story. Somehow, very few network users even considered that such a thing was happening.
Cut to Tuesday: Facebook built revision-tracking functionality into the common user interface, and those users revolted. It was just too creepy. It required no effort to retrieve potentially sensitive data. The irony of the situation is that such tools were readily available before Facebook incorporated them officially into the UI. It was just as easy to do what Facebook did with Feed with Firefox extensions such as Facebook Stalker or home-brew PHP scripts interfacing with the Facebook API. If you don’t think it was that easy, go try the extensions. It’s surprising to think that the users scared off by Feed weren’t scared off earlier with the release of third-party tools. If someone wanted to stalk a Facebook user, they had much more powerful tools than Feed before its release, and Feed does little to change that power balance.
User Awareness 101: Solving the network information issue
It’s safe to assume that Facebook has been has been tracking Feed data previous to the launch of the Feed functionality to the end user (although I have no insider knowledge of this being the case or not.) When Feed was launched, there was some data already aggregated; the fact also exists that this data would’ve been necessary to test the feature before public release. Facebook’s privacy policy states that metrics and profile changes are recorded:
When you use Facebook, you may form relationships, send messages, perform searches and queries, form groups, set up events, and transmit information through various channels. We collect this information so that we can provide you the service and offer personalized features. In most cases, we retain it so that, for instance, you can return to view prior messages you have sent or easily see your friend list. When you update information, we usually keep a backup copy of the prior version for a reasonable period of time to enable reversion to the prior version of that information.
There are other places where Facebook is privately collecting currently undisplayed data: try removing an enrolled course and you’ll notice an ominous “Course Completed” option next to “Remove”. Either button results in the same action on the user’s end; one cannot be sure that this is the case in the database.
A developmental roadblock?
At the end of it all, the only question we have to ask is not whether or not this was just creepy or somehow beneficial: it’s what this type of quick access to information in ways such as Facebook Feed will have on new social applications. Feed is an interaction designer’s utopia, but if it deters a userbase from growing, interaction designers will be forced to build inferior interfaces for the sake of user comfort, much like earlier days when those building websites were forced to build sites for the most common browser instead of the best possible way.
It’s very possible that users could get used to interfaces like Feed over time; after all, it seems that many great advances in interface design (and design in general, for that matter,) are always met with healthy doses of concern and Luddism, regardless of the net benefits of the new design. It’s a rare case in which the user’s own obsolescence holds back technology, and it’s the user’s flawed perspective of the information sphere that causes such controversy to begin with. When Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg attempted to explain that Facebook Feed just presented data that users had access to anyway on the Facebook blog, he was still shunned by the majority of the community.
Eventually, Zuckerberg actually had to apologise for the better interface, stating that “We really messed this one up.” Should Zuckerberg have to apologise to a community for building a better interface? I don’t think so. Then again, I’m not a common user. Maybe it’d be better if Facebook’s user base learned a little interface design and network security themselves.
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