Privacy and Trust In The Age of Social Networks

An interesting article describes the reaction of Facebook members to the News Feeds feature added Monday which allow members to be notified when a friend’s site is updated. From a member’s perspective, being updated when friend’s update their pages is a good thing, right? Not if you’re a member of Facebook apparently. Look at the quotes from a members’ petition which has 500,000 members who are protesting this feature’s addition to the Facebook offering:

“News Feed is just too creepy, too stalker-esque, and a feature that has to go,” reads the petition of the newly formed “Students against Facebook News Feed.”

Other comments revolve around the stalking issue as well. Given Facebooks tighter controls (registered users must have a .edu email address or other approved domain email address), this seems like a bit of an over-reaction. MySpace is a completely different deal as there are almost no controls….

BUT HERE IS THE KEY TO THIS — when planning new features, there is a balance between the trust you’ve gained with your members and the functionality improvements you believe you are giving members. The most important reason why Social Networks survived early on was that their members trusted that only people they knew or wanted to know would contact them. There was at least an outward appearance that private information would stay private. But as Social Networking sites have expanded, the value and the trust has declined in members’ eyes. For instance look at LinkedIn… How many of you have been contacted by someone two or more levels away from your contacts? (Think six degrees of separation or the Kevin Bacon game.)

Will the News Feed feature survive at Facebook? I think it will, but the management at Facebook apparently didn’t think the backlash would come as hard as it did. And that is the second lesson from all this. When you are adding features, be prepared for the worst and have plans to help your membership get through the changes. In this case 5.3% of the members of Facebook (500,000 out of 9,500,000) have signed a petition to protest the changes. That is significant. Facebook’s blog responds by posting “Calm. down. breathe. We hear you,” to its members. That might work with students, but it would never work with adults as it comes off as condescending in its tone.

As mentioned in a previous post on our blog titled “Web 2.0 Collaboration Success Comes From Facilitation”, the role of moderators who can effectively facilitate conversations (especially conversations like this) really make the difference between a site which is trusted by its members and one that is not.

Want to learn more about Privacy and Trust in Social Networks? Contact Us and we’d be happy to continue the conversation.

UPDATE 9/9/06 — After much feedback from its userbase, Facebook has made a change… members can now decide through privacy settings what (if any) details will be available on the News Feed that reports updates to their pages. Good going Facebook, but this whole thing could have been avoided with a little planning.

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