Facebook Shows Off New Tools to Socialize the Entire Web

SAN FRANCISCO, California — Facebook is launching a new suite of tools that bring the Facebook social experience to any site on the web.

The company is releasing a set of products called Social Plugins, which any web publishers can drop into their website using one very simple line of code. These plug-ins will let visitors “Like” news stories, photos and so on. Once a user likes something, it instantly gets added to the appropriate section of their Facebook profile.

The plug-ins are part of a new Facebook initiative to make every website on the internet sharable across its network, something the company is calling the Open Graph.

The announcements were made by Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and platform engineer Brett Taylor at the company’s F8 developer’s conference taking place here Wednesday.

Facebook will roll out the Like buttons Wednesday morning, and Zuckerberg boldly estimates that within 24 hours, there will be one billion Like buttons across the web.

Facebook has often been branded as the next AOL, a website that basically recreates several experiences available on the open web — chat, e-mail and link sharing — behind a closed gate. But with Wednesday’s Open Graph announcements, the company is giving website owners a bigger door into Facebook’s closed system using simple HTML tools and by incorporating open standards into its authentication system.

Zuckerberg, speaking with his trademark brand of stiff, awkward enthusiasm, calls the new Open Graph initiative “the most transformative thing we’ve ever done for the web.”

A grand platitude, certainly, but one of the most transformative shifts in Facebook’s policies, as it enables sites to more easily link up their content on the open web with the Facebook ecosystem and access its 400 million active users.

“With these tools, any web page can become a Facebook page,” Taylor says. “If you don’t like the way Facebook pages look, just make your own. Add the Like buttons and the Open Graph elements and you’ve got a page that’s fully integrated into Facebook.”

Central to the experience is the Like button. Websites can add them by dropping in an i-frame, and when a Facebook user clicks on it, it’s the same as them clicking on a Like button inside Facebook. Facebook knows who the person is, because it can now see a user’s logged-in state via a cookie.

There’s also a Recommendations plug-in, which shows you a curated list of content on the site you’re visiting that you might be interested in.

It’s not just a blind list of the 10 most-read or most-e-mailed articles on the site, Taylor explained, but a socially curated list based on what you are interested in.

Third is an Activity Stream plug-in, which shows you what your friends are up to and Liking around the web.

The new social plug-ins offer instant personalization to any website, Zuckerberg says. “You can have a user who’s never been to your site before and present them with a totally personalized experience.”

The final widget is a Facebook Bar, a toolbar website publishers can float at the bottom of their site’s user interface (again with an i-frame) to make these sharing features more visible. It also has elements that let users send Facebook mails or hold chat sessions.

To handle user authentication across all of these pieces on the web, Facebook is adopting the OAuth 2.0 standard — an open-source industry standard that’s already being used by Twitter and other social networks. We expected something like this and predicted it in our pre-conference coverage.

During a press conference after the keynote, Zuckerberg and Taylor said that Facebook will be ditching the Facebook Connect brand. Connect will be replaced by OAuth 2.0, and all authentication will be handled by the various Open Graph tools, which utilize the standard.

“It’s an industry standard and it’s super easy,” Taylor said of OAuth, “You can implement it in about five minutes, as opposed to five days for our old authentication system.”

Facebook is also giving websites a new way to identify themselves using semantic HTML. The new markup tells Facebook what type of real-world object your site represents. So, if you run a band website, you can add semantic HTML tags that tell Facebook a bit about the band: we are called Throbbing Monkeys and we are from San Francisco. So, when a Facebook user clicks on the Like button embedded on your page, the band gets added to the “Music” section of their profile.

Best of all, the link that appears on the user’s Facebook profile will lead directly to the website where the Like button was clicked — a first.

“For the first time, the Likes and Favorites on my profile page are linked to sites off of Facebook.com,” Bret Taylor said. He earned a round of applause.

Finally, Faceboook is also dropping the policy that forbids outside applications from holding on to user data for more than 24 hours. This was a controversial policy to begin with, since it prevented developers from making anything (like an RSS reader or a photo-browsing app) that let the user keep things like status updates any longer than a day.

“This is just a technical restriction that we’re lifting,” Taylor says. “It doesn’t change any of the rules around what you can and can’t do with the user data.”

Facebook is offering real-time user action updates as part of the new Graph API, which makes it easier for developers to consume user’s activity streams.

Brett Taylor, who walked through the real-time features of the Graph API is part of the team that built FriendFeed, which Facebook aquired last year. Taylor says there aren’t any plans to develop FriendFeed any further, but that Facebook will keep it alive.

UPDATED at 2:30pm PDT to include details about OAuth and Facebook Connect.

See Also:


How Facebook Could Organize The Internet

Apr 22 2010, 1:30 PM ET | Comment

If Facebook has its way, you'll never surf the same way again.

The company announced big plans this week that enable developers to label their sites and exchange information about Facebook users, potentially setting the stage to better organize the web.

The idea for such a reorganization has been around for a long time. Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, years ago envisioned the next stage in the web's evolution, calling it the Semantic Web. It would, he wrote, "bring structure to the meaningful content of Web pages," enabling computers to understand that content and how it relates to other sites and information across the internet. Change has been slow because standards are hard to set and enforce, but Facebook's scale could accelerate the transformation.

First, you have to understand how Facebook plans to expand its reach. The company is extending its plumbing to other sites to become a sort of clearinghouse on how its 400 million users navigate the web. Visit review site Yelp.com, one of three current partner sites, and the site can find out which of your Facebook friends are on the site and then show recent reviews and photos they've uploaded. Yelp does this by accessing Open Graph, the new Facebook framework that allows developers to exchange information. Using Open Graph, sites can create subsets around users' interests and exchange that information with one another, TechCrunch reports:

Yelp might create one around restaurants, Pandora might create one around music, Netflix around movies. Add some "like" buttons and anytime someone likes a restaurant, song, or movie anywhere on the Web with a Facebook like button, that information will flow back into the Open Graph. So that Yelp will know what restaurants you and your friends have liked elsewhere and take that into consideration when giving you recommendations, or Pandora with music, and so on. (Yelp and Pandora are real examples, Netflix isn't).
Given its scale, Facebook could end up completely transforming the web and may have even won the war against Google. If enough sites buy in, Facebook would have helped set a standard that would usher in a long-awaited, new era, writes Newsweek's Barrett Sheridan:

Computer scientists have long envisioned a Web 3.0, a smarter Internet that understands the difference between objects, people, places, animals, etc. In other words, computers and servers should know that Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is an object, and in particular it's a film, and in particular a film by Michel Gondry, who is a person. Right now computers see words like "Michel Gondry" only as dumb, meaningless text. Facebook wants to change that--which is great. But it also plans to own that information--which is scary.
Privacy concerns abound and could block Facebook's march to control the web. So could other companies if they refuse to participate. But Facebook's plans are ambitious and, if it succeeds, it could become more than just a social network.


Building the Social Web Together
by Mark Zuckerberg on Wednesday, April 21, 2010 at 1:44pm
Facebook has always focused on building ways for people to connect with each other and share information with their friends. We think this is important because people are shaping how information moves through their connections. People are increasingly discovering information not just through links to web pages but also from the people and things they care about.

This flow of social information has profound benefits—from driving better decisions to keeping in touch more easily—and we're really proud that Facebook is part of the shift toward more social and personalized experiences everywhere online.

Three years ago at our first f8 conference for developers, I introduced the concept of the social graph, which is the idea that if you mapped out all the connections between people and the things they care about, it would form a graph that connects everyone together. Facebook has focused mostly on mapping out the part of the graph around people and their relationships.

At the same time, other sites and services have been mapping out other parts of the graph so you can get relevant information about different types of things. For example, Yelp maps out the best local businesses and Pandora maps out which songs are related to each other.

All of these connections are important parts of the social graph, but until now it hasn't been possible to easily share the connections you make on sites like Yelp or Pandora with your friends on Facebook. And you haven't been able to bring your friends from Facebook to share experiences on these sites or personalize them to you.

Today at our third f8, we are making it so all websites can work together to build a more comprehensive map of connections and create better, more social experiences for everyone. We have redesigned Facebook Platform to offer a simple set of tools that sites around the web can use to personalize experiences and build out the graph of connections people are making.



This next version of Facebook Platform puts people at the center of the web. It lets you shape your experiences online and make them more social. For example, if you like a band on Pandora, that information can become part of the graph so that later if you visit a concert site, the site can tell you when the band you like is coming to your area. The power of the open graph is that it helps to create a smarter, personalized web that gets better with every action taken.

We think that the future of the web will be filled with personalized experiences. We've worked with three pre-selected partners—Microsoft Docs, Yelp and Pandora—to give you a glimpse of this future, which you can access without having to login again or click to connect. For example, now if you're logged into Facebook and go to Pandora for the first time, it can immediately start playing songs from bands you've liked across the web. And as you're playing music, it can show you friends who also like the same songs as you, and then you can click to see other music they like.

We look forward to a future where all experiences are this easy and personalized, and we're happy today to take the next important step to get there.




Facebook Shows Off New Tools to Socialize the Entire Web

SAN FRANCISCO, California — Facebook is launching a new suite of tools that bring the Facebook social experience to any site on the web.

The company is releasing a set of products called Social Plugins, which any web publishers can drop into their website using one very simple line of code. These plug-ins will let visitors “Like” news stories, photos and so on. Once a user likes something, it instantly gets added to the appropriate section of their Facebook profile.

The plug-ins are part of a new Facebook initiative to make every website on the internet sharable across its network, something the company is calling the Open Graph.

The announcements were made by Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and platform engineer Brett Taylor at the company’s F8 developer’s conference taking place here Wednesday.

Facebook will roll out the Like buttons Wednesday morning, and Zuckerberg boldly estimates that within 24 hours, there will be one billion Like buttons across the web.

Facebook has often been branded as the next AOL, a website that basically recreates several experiences available on the open web — chat, e-mail and link sharing — behind a closed gate. But with Wednesday’s Open Graph announcements, the company is giving website owners a bigger door into Facebook’s closed system using simple HTML tools and by incorporating open standards into its authentication system.

Zuckerberg, speaking with his trademark brand of stiff, awkward enthusiasm, calls the new Open Graph initiative “the most transformative thing we’ve ever done for the web.”

A grand platitude, certainly, but one of the most transformative shifts in Facebook’s policies, as it enables sites to more easily link up their content on the open web with the Facebook ecosystem and access its 400 million active users.

“With these tools, any web page can become a Facebook page,” Taylor says. “If you don’t like the way Facebook pages look, just make your own. Add the Like buttons and the Open Graph elements and you’ve got a page that’s fully integrated into Facebook.”

Central to the experience is the Like button. Websites can add them by dropping in an i-frame, and when a Facebook user clicks on it, it’s the same as them clicking on a Like button inside Facebook. Facebook knows who the person is, because it can now see a user’s logged-in state via a cookie.

There’s also a Recommendations plug-in, which shows you a curated list of content on the site you’re visiting that you might be interested in.

It’s not just a blind list of the 10 most-read or most-e-mailed articles on the site, Taylor explained, but a socially curated list based on what you are interested in.

Third is an Activity Stream plug-in, which shows you what your friends are up to and Liking around the web.

The new social plug-ins offer instant personalization to any website, Zuckerberg says. “You can have a user who’s never been to your site before and present them with a totally personalized experience.”

The final widget is a Facebook Bar, a toolbar website publishers can float at the bottom of their site’s user interface (again with an i-frame) to make these sharing features more visible. It also has elements that let users send Facebook mails or hold chat sessions.

To handle user authentication across all of these pieces on the web, Facebook is adopting the OAuth 2.0 standard — an open-source industry standard that’s already being used by Twitter and other social networks. We expected something like this and predicted it in our pre-conference coverage.

During a press conference after the keynote, Zuckerberg and Taylor said that Facebook will be ditching the Facebook Connect brand. Connect will be replaced by OAuth 2.0, and all authentication will be handled by the various Open Graph tools, which utilize the standard.

“It’s an industry standard and it’s super easy,” Taylor said of OAuth, “You can implement it in about five minutes, as opposed to five days for our old authentication system.”

Facebook is also giving websites a new way to identify themselves using semantic HTML. The new markup tells Facebook what type of real-world object your site represents. So, if you run a band website, you can add semantic HTML tags that tell Facebook a bit about the band: we are called Throbbing Monkeys and we are from San Francisco. So, when a Facebook user clicks on the Like button embedded on your page, the band gets added to the “Music” section of their profile.

Best of all, the link that appears on the user’s Facebook profile will lead directly to the website where the Like button was clicked — a first.

“For the first time, the Likes and Favorites on my profile page are linked to sites off of Facebook.com,” Bret Taylor said. He earned a round of applause.

Finally, Faceboook is also dropping the policy that forbids outside applications from holding on to user data for more than 24 hours. This was a controversial policy to begin with, since it prevented developers from making anything (like an RSS reader or a photo-browsing app) that let the user keep things like status updates any longer than a day.

“This is just a technical restriction that we’re lifting,” Taylor says. “It doesn’t change any of the rules around what you can and can’t do with the user data.”

Facebook is offering real-time user action updates as part of the new Graph API, which makes it easier for developers to consume user’s activity streams.

Brett Taylor, who walked through the real-time features of the Graph API is part of the team that built FriendFeed, which Facebook aquired last year. Taylor says there aren’t any plans to develop FriendFeed any further, but that Facebook will keep it alive.

UPDATED at 2:30pm PDT to include details about OAuth and Facebook Connect.

See Also:


10 Privacy Settings Every Facebook User Should Know

-Security Camera Image-We’ve updated this guide with the new privacy settings just launched by Facebook. You can get the new Facebook privacy guide now.
Everyday I receive an email from somebody about how their account was hacked, how a friend tagged them in the photo and they want a way to avoid it, as well as a number of other complications related to their privacy on Facebook. Over the weekend one individual contacted me to let me know that he would be removing me as a friend from Facebook because he was “going to make a shift with my Facebook use - going to just mostly family stuff.”

Perhaps he was tired of receiving my status updates or perhaps he didn’t want me to view photos from his personal life. Whatever the reason for ending our Facebook friendship, I figured that many people would benefit from a thorough overview on how to protect your privacy on Facebook. Below is a step by step process for protecting your privacy.

1. Use Your Friend Lists

-Friend Lists Icon-I can’t tell you how many people are not aware of their friend lists. For those not aware of what friend lists are, Facebook describes them as a feature which allows “you to create private groupings of friends based on your personal preferences. For example, you can create a Friend List for your friends that meet for weekly book club meetings. You can create Friend Lists for all of your organizational needs, allowing you to quickly view friends by type and send messages to your lists.”

There are a few very important things to remember about friend lists:

  • You can add each friend to more than one friend group
  • Friend groups should be used like “tags” as used elsewhere around the web
  • Friend Lists can have specific privacy policies applied to them

I’ll touch on each of the things listed above in more detail later. A typical setup for groups would be “Friends”, “Family”, and “Professional”. These three groups can then be used to apply different privacy policies. For example, you may want your friends to see photos from the party you were at last night, but you don’t want your family or professional contacts to see those photos.

Using friend lists is also extremely useful for organizing your friends if you have a lot of them. For instance I have about 20 friend lists and I categorize people by city (New York, San Francisco, D.C., Tel Aviv, etc), where I met them (conferences, past co-workers, through this blog), and my relationship with them (professional, family, social, etc).

You can configure your friend lists by visiting the friends area of your Facebook.

2. Remove Yourself From Facebook Search Results

-Facebook Search Listing Screenshot-

My mom is a teacher and one of the first things she asked me when she joined Facebook is how she could make sure her students couldn’t see that she was on the site. Understandably my mom doesn’t want her middle school students to know what she’s up to in her personal life. There are numerous reasons that individuals don’t want their information to show up in search results on Facebook, and it’s simple to turn off your public visibility.

How to Remove Yourself From Facebook Search Results
Now that you’ve decided that you would like to remove yourself from Facebook’s search results, here’s how to do it:

  1. Visit your search privacy settings page
  2. Under “Search Visibility” select “Only Friends” (Remember, doing so will remove you from Facebook search results, so make sure you want to be removed totally. Otherwise, you can select another group, such as “My Networks and Friends” which I believe is the default.)
  3. Click “Save Changes”

By default, Facebook makes your presence visible to the network you are in. Frequently, people aren’t aware of their visibility, so this is one of the first settings that users wish to modify. By selecting “Customize” from the search visibility drop down you can make your settings even more granular.

-Facebook Search Visibility Screenshot-

3. Remove Yourself From Google

-Public Search Listing Screenshot-

Facebook gets A TON of traffic from displaying user profiles in search engines. Not all of your profile is displayed though. Currently the information displayed in the search profile is limited to: your profile picture, a list of your friends, a link to add you as a friend, a link to send you a message, and a list of up to approximately 20 fan pages that you are a member of.

For some people, being displayed in the search engines is a great way to let people get in contact with you, especially if you don’t have an existing website. Facebook also tends to rank high in the search results, so if you want to be easy to find, making your search profile can be a great idea. Many people don’t want any of their information to be public though.

By visiting the same search privacy settings page listed in the previous step, you can control the visibility of your public search listing which is visible to Google and other search engines. You can turn off your public search listing by simply unchecking the box next to the phrase “Create a public search listing for me and submit it for search engine indexing” as pictured in the image below.

-Facebook Public Search Disable Screenshot-

4. Avoid the Infamous Photo/Video Tag Mistake

-Drunk Tagged Facebook Photo-

This is the classic Facebook problem. You let loose for a few hours one night (or day) and photos (or videos) of the moment are suddenly posted for all to view, not just your close friends who shared the moment with you. The result can be devastating. Some have been fired from work after incriminating photos/videos were posted for the boss to see. For others, randomly tagged photos/videos have ended relationships.

At the least, a tagged photo/video can result in personal embarrassment. So how do you prevent the infamous tagged photo or video from showing up in all of your friends news feeds? It’s pretty simple. First visit your profile privacy page and modify the setting next to “Photos Tagged of You”. Select the option which says “Customize…” and a box like the one pictured below will pop up.

Select the option “Only Me” and then “None of My Networks” if you would like to keep all tagged photos private. If you’d like to make tagged photos visible to certain users you can choose to add them in the box under the “Some Friends” option. In the box that displays after you select “Some Friends” you can type either individual friends or friend lists.

-Facebook Tagged Photo Privacy Settings Screenshot-

5. Protect Your Albums

-Facebook Photos Profile Screenshot-Just because you’ve uploaded photos doesn’t mean that you’ve accurately tagged every photo correctly. This setting is more of a reminder than anything else. Frequently people will turn of their tagged photo visibility to certain friend lists yet keep their photo albums public to the world. If you are trying to make all your photos invisible you must do so on an album by album basis.

There is a specific Photos Privacy page from which you can manually configure the visibility of each album (as pictured below). This is an extremely useful configuration option and I highly recommend that you take advantage of it. This way you can store your photos indefinitely on Facebook yet ensure that the only people that can view your photos are the ones who you really want to see them.

-Facebook Photos Privacy Screenshot-

Holy Grail of Facebook Privacy

6. Prevent Stories From Showing Up in Your Friends’ News Feeds

-Relationship Status Notification Change Option Screenshot-

Oh, did you really just break up with your girlfriend? I’m sorry to hear that. I’m sure all of your friends and business contacts are also sorry to hear that. I can’t tell you how many awkward relationship status changes I’ve seen. The most regular one I’ve seen recently is when an attractive female ends their relationship and numerous guys hop on the opportunity to console her.

I’ve also seen the end of marriages, as well as weekly relationship status changes as individuals try to determine where their relationship stands with their significant other. My personal policy is to not display a relationship status, but many like to make a public statement out of their relationship. For those individuals, it can be a smart move to hedge against future disasters.

There are a number of ways to control how your relationship status is displayed. The first thing that most people should do is uncheck the box next to “Remove Relationship Status” in the News Feed and Wall Privacy page. In the rare instance that a relationship does uncomfortably end, you can avoid making things more uncomfortable by avoiding a friend notification about it.

Second, your relationship status falls within your “Basic Information” section of your profile. You can control who can see your basic information next to the “Basic Information” setting on the Profile Privacy page. Keep in mind that other relevant profile information like your gender, birth date, networks, and other settings are visible within your basic information section.

Making your basic information completely invisible to friends probably isn’t a good idea, but removing the news feed stories about relationship changes most likely is.

7. Protect Against Published Application Stories

-Have Sex! Notification Screenshot-

This one is a little more tricky to manage but I’ll explain the issue at hand. Frequently when you add an application, a news feed item is immediately published to your profile. One way to get instantly embarrassed is to visit the “Have Sex!” application (found here). This application has no purpose besides telling your friends that you are interested in having sex with them. Without taking any action, the application will post a news feed story to your profile which says the equivalent of “Nick just published to the world that he is having sex!”

This is surely something that none of your professional contacts if any of your contacts are interested in seeing (honestly I’m a bit confused about that application, but that’s a different story). That’s why it’s important to monitor what takes place after you install an application on Facebook. Once you install an application you should visit your profile to ensure that no embarrassing notification has been posted to your profile.

More often then not, nothing will be posted but there are many applications on the platform unfortunately that publish stories without you knowing it. There are two ways to avoid having this happen: don’t visit applications or scan your profile every time that you do. Ultimately you shouldn’t be concerned about applications that you’ve built a trusted relationship with but any new applications could potentially post embarrassing notifications.

8. Make Your Contact Information Private

I personally use Facebook for professional and personal use and it can frequently become overwhelming. That’s why I’ve taken the time to outline these ten privacy protection steps. One of the first things I did when I started approving friend requests from people that I hadn’t built a strong relationship with, was make my contact information visible only to close contacts.

The contact information is my personal email and phone number. It’s a simple thing to set but many people forget to do it. Frequently people we don’t know end up contacting us and we have no idea how they got our contact information. Your contact privacy can be edited right from your profile. If you have chosen to enter this information, you should see a “Contact Information” area under the “Info” tab in your profile.

If it displays, you simply click “Edit” and then a screen like the one pictured below will show up.

-Profile Contact Edit Form Screenshot-

For each contact item that you have in your profile you should set custom privacy settings (as pictured below) so that contacts that you aren’t close to don’t have access to your phone number and/or email. It’s a small change but it can save you the hassle of being pestered by people you don’t know well. Also, protecting your privacy is generally a good practice to get in the habit of doing.

As a side note, this is a great area to take advantage of friend lists. By getting in the habit of grouping your friends, you can ensure that you are navigating Facebook safely through privacy settings that are attached to your friend lists.

-Facebook Contact Privacy Settings Screenshot-

9. Avoid Embarrassing Wall Posts

Just because you use Facebook for business doesn’t mean your friends do. That’s why once in a while a friend of yours will come post something embarrassing or not necessarily “work friendly” and it can end up having adverse effects. That’s why Facebook has provided you with the ability to customize your wall postings visibility. You can also control which friends can post on your wall. There are two places you can control these things.

Adjust Wall Posting Visibility

-Facebook Wall Story Settings Screenshot-

Within your profile page you can control who can view wall postings made by your friends. To do so, click on the “Settings” icon on the wall in your profile page. Next, find the box pictured in the image above and adjust the setting which says “Who can see posts made by friends?” I’d suggest using a strategy similar to the one outlined in the previous step regarding contact information.

Control Who Can Post to Your Wall
In addition to controlling who can view wall postings published by your friends, you also want to control which friends can post on your wall. Not everybody needs to do this, but occasionally you simply want to prevent some people from posting on your page. If you visit the Profile Privacy settings page, there is a section labeled “Wall Posts”.

From this area you can completely disable your friends’ ability to post on your wall. You can also select specific friend lists that can post on your wall. Personally, I don’t really care who can post on my wall but I can understand the need to control who can see those wall postings. If you want to limit who can post wall posts on your profile, this is where you can do it.

10. Keep Your Friendships Private

While it’s fun to show off that you have hundreds or thousands of friends on Facebook, some of your friends don’t want to live public lives. That’s why it’s often a good policy to turn off your friends’ visibility to others. I’ve had a number of individuals visit my profile and then selectively pick off friends that are relevant to them for marketing purposes, or other reasons.

Whatever the reason they are doing it, just know that they are … it’s part of what makes Facebook so addictive: the voyeuristic nature. Also, your friends are frequently visible to the public through search engines and exposing this information can ultimately present a security risk. To modify the visibility of your friends, visit the Profile Privacy page.

Navigate down to the setting which says “Friends” and then modify the setting to whatever is right for you.

-Custom Friend Visibility Settings Screenshot-

Conclusion

These are just ten ways that you can protect your privacy on Facebook. While there are a few other small things to keep in mind, these ten settings are most important. Keep in mind that while you may have turned off the visibility of many profile sections, there is no way to prevent all photos or videos from being visible if friends of yours make the images visible.

The best way to prevent embarrassing items from showing up on Facebook in the future is to not make bad judgements in your personal life. We’re all human though and being completely paranoid about every choice you make is probably not the best way to live your life. Be aware of what privacy settings are available and be conscious of what your friends may be publishing about you.

While you may not want to configure all of the privacy settings outlined, simply knowing how to do so is a great step in the right direction. By following the 10 settings listed above you are well on your way to an embarrassment free future on Facebook!

Facebook’s Privacy Policy.


Date of last revision: April 22, 2010.

This policy contains eight sections, and you can jump to each by selecting the links below:

1. Introduction
2. Information We Receive
3. Information You Share With Third Parties
4. Sharing Information on Facebook
5. How We Use Your Information
6. How We Share Information
7. How You Can View, Change, or Remove Information
8. How We Protect Information
9. Other Terms

1. Introduction


Questions. If you have any questions or concerns about our privacy policy, contact our privacy team through this help page. You may also contact us by mail at 1601 S. California Avenue, Palo Alto, CA 94304.

TRUSTe Program. Facebook is a certified licensee of the TRUSTe Privacy Seal Program. This means that our privacy policy and practices have been reviewed by TRUSTe, an independent organization focused on reviewing privacy and security policies and practices, for compliance with its strict program requirements. This privacy policy covers the website www.facebook.com. The TRUSTe program covers only information that is collected through this Web site, and does not cover other information, such as information that may be collected through software downloaded from Facebook.

If you have any complaints about our policy or practices please let us know through this help page. If you are not satisfied with our response, you can contact TRUSTe.






Safe Harbor. Facebook also adheres to the Safe Harbor framework developed by the U.S. Department of Commerce and the European Union. As part of our participation in the Safe Harbor, we agree to resolve all disputes you have with us in connection with our policies and practices through TRUSTe. To view our certification, visit the U.S. Department of Commerce's Safe Harbor Web site.

Scope. This privacy policy covers all of Facebook. It does not, however, apply to entities that Facebook does not own or control, such as applications and websites using Platform. By using or accessing Facebook, you agree to our privacy practices outlined here.

No information from children under age 13. If you are under age 13, please do not attempt to register for Facebook or provide any personal information about yourself to us. If we learn that we have collected personal information from a child under age 13, we will delete that information as quickly as possible. If you believe that we might have any information from a child under age 13, please contact us through this help page.

Parental participation. We strongly recommend that minors 13 years of age or older ask their parents for permission before sending any information about themselves to anyone over the Internet and we encourage parents to teach their children about safe internet use practices. Materials to help parents talk to their children about safe internet use can be found on this help page.

2. Information We Receive

Information you provide to us:

Information About Yourself.
When you sign up for Facebook you provide us with your name, email, gender, and birth date. During the registration process we give you the opportunity to connect with your friends, schools, and employers. You will also be able to add a picture of yourself. In some cases we may ask for additional information for security reasons or to provide specific services to you. Once you register you can provide other information about yourself by connecting with, for example, your current city, hometown, family, relationships, networks, activities, interests, and places.   You can also provide personal information about yourself, such as your political and religious views.

Content. One of the primary reasons people use Facebook is to share content with others. Examples include when you update your status, upload or take a photo, upload or record a video, share a link, create an event or a group, make a comment, write something on someone’s Wall, write a note, or send someone a message. If you do not want us to store metadata associated with content you share on Facebook (such as photos), please remove the metadata before uploading the content.

Transactional Information. We may retain the details of transactions or payments you make on Facebook. If you do not want us to store your payment source account number, you can remove it using your payments page.  

Friend Information. We offer contact importer tools to help you upload your friends’ addresses so that you can find your friends on Facebook, and invite your contacts who do not have Facebook accounts to join. If you do not want us to store this information, visit this help page. If you give us your password to retrieve those contacts, we will not store your password after you have uploaded your contacts’ information.

Information we collect when you interact with Facebook:

Site activity information. We keep track of some of the actions you take on Facebook, such as adding connections (including joining a group or adding a friend), creating a photo album, sending a gift, poking another user, indicating you “like” a post, attending an event, or connecting with an application. In some cases you are also taking an action when you provide information or content to us. For example, if you share a video, in addition to storing the actual content you uploaded, we might log the fact that you shared it.

Access Device and Browser Information. When you access Facebook from a computer, mobile phone, or other device, we may collect information from that device about your browser type, location, and IP address, as well as the pages you visit.

Cookie Information. We use "cookies" (small pieces of data we store for an extended period of time on your computer, mobile phone, or other device) to make Facebook easier to use, to make our advertising better, and to protect both you and Facebook. For example, we use them to store your login ID (but never your password) to make it easier for you to login whenever you come back to Facebook. We also use them to confirm that you are logged into Facebook, and to know when you are interacting with Facebook Platform applications and websites, our widgets and Share buttons, and our advertisements. You can remove or block cookies using the settings in your browser, but in some cases that may impact your ability to use Facebook.

Information we receive from third parties:

Facebook Platform. We do not own or operate the applications or websites that you use through Facebook Platform (such as games and utilities). Whenever you connect with a Platform application or website, we will receive information from them, including information about actions you take. In some cases, in order to personalize the process of connecting, we may receive a limited amount of information even before you connect with the application or website.

Information from other websites. We may institute programs with advertising partners and other websites in which they share information with us:
 

  • We may ask advertisers to tell us how our users responded to the ads we showed them (and for comparison purposes, how other users who didn’t see the ads acted on their site). This data sharing, commonly known as “conversion tracking,” helps us measure our advertising effectiveness and improve the quality of the advertisements you see.
  • We may receive information about whether or not you’ve seen or interacted with certain ads on other sites in order to measure the effectiveness of those ads.



If in any of these cases we receive data that we do not already have, we will “anonymize” it within 180 days, meaning we will stop associating the information with any particular user. If we institute these programs, we will only use the information in the ways we explain in the “How We Use Your Information” section below.

Information from other users. We may collect information about you from other Facebook users, such as when a friend tags you in a photo, video, or place, provides friend details, or indicates a relationship with you.

3. Sharing information on Facebook.

This section explains how your privacy settings work, and how your information is shared on Facebook.  You should always consider your privacy settings before sharing information on Facebook.

Name and Profile Picture.  Facebook is designed to make it easy for you to find and connect with others.  For this reason, your name and profile picture do not have privacy settings.  If you are uncomfortable with sharing your profile picture, you should delete it (or not add one).  You can also control who can find you when searching on Facebook or on public search engines using your search settings.

Contact Information. Your contact information settings control who can contact you on Facebook, and who can see your contact information such as your email and phone number(s).  Remember that none of this information is required except for your email address, and you do not have to share your email address with anyone.

Personal Information.  Your personal information settings control who can see your personal information, such as your religious and political views, if you choose to add them.  We recommend that you share this information using the friends of friends setting.

Posts by Me.  You can select a privacy setting for every post you make using the publisher on our site.  Whether you are uploading a photo or posting a status update, you can control exactly who can see it at the time you create it.  Whenever you share something look for the lock icon.  Clicking on the lock will bring up a menu that lets you choose who will be able to see your post.  If you decide not to select your setting at the time you post the content, your content will be shared consistent with your Posts by Me privacy setting.

Connections.  Facebook enables you to connect with virtually anyone or anything you want, from your friends and family to the city you live in to the restaurants you like to visit to the bands and movies you love.  Because it takes two to connect, your privacy settings only control who can see the connection on your profile page.  If you are uncomfortable with the connection being publicly available, you should consider removing (or not making) the connection.

Gender and Birth Date.  In addition to name and email address, we require you to provide your gender and birth date during the registration process.  We ask for your date of birth to verify that you are 13 or older, and so that we can better limit your access to content and advertisements that are not age appropriate.  Because your date of birth and gender are required, you cannot delete them.  You can, however, edit your profile to hide all (or part) of such fields from other users.

Other.  Here are some other things to remember:
 

  • Some of the content you share and the actions you take will show up on your friends’ home pages and other pages they visit.
  • If another user tags you in a photo or video or at a place, you can remove the tag.  You can also limit who can see that you have been tagged on your profile from your privacy settings.
  • Even after you remove information from your profile or delete your account, copies of that information may remain viewable elsewhere to the extent it has been shared with others, it was otherwise distributed pursuant to your privacy settings, or it was copied or stored by other users.
  • You understand that information might be reshared or copied by other users.
  • Certain types of communications that you send to other users cannot be removed, such as messages.
  • When you post information on another user’s profile or comment on another user’s post, that information will be subject to the other user’s privacy settings.
  • If you use an external source to publish information to Facebook (such as a mobile application or a Connect site), you should check the privacy setting for that post, as it is set by that external source.


“Everyone” Information. Information set to “everyone” is publicly available information, just like your name, profile picture, and connections.  Such information may, for example, be accessed by everyone on the Internet (including people not logged into Facebook), be indexed by third party search engines, and be imported, exported, distributed, and redistributed by us and others without privacy limitations. Such information may also be associated with you, including your name and profile picture, even outside of Facebook, such as on public search engines and when you visit other sites on the internet.  The default privacy setting for certain types of information you post on Facebook is set to “everyone.” You can review and change the default settings in your privacy settings. If you delete “everyone” content that you posted on Facebook, we will remove it from your Facebook profile, but have no control over its use outside of Facebook.

Minors.  We reserve the right to add special protections for minors (such as to provide them with an age-appropriate experience) and place restrictions on the ability of adults to share and connect with minors, recognizing this may provide minors a more limited experience on Facebook

4.  Information You Share With Third Parties.

Facebook Platform.  As mentioned above, we do not own or operate the applications or websites that use Facebook Platform. That means that when you use those applications and websites you are making your Facebook information available to someone other than Facebook. Prior to allowing them to access any information about you, we require them to agree to terms that limit their use of your information (which you can read about in Section 9 of our Statement of Rights and Responsibilities) and we use technical measures to ensure that they only obtain authorized information.  To learn more about Platform, visit our About Platform page.

Connecting with an Application or Website.  When you connect with an application or website it will have access to General Information about you.  The term General Information includes your and your friends’ names, profile pictures, gender, user IDs, connections, and any content shared using the Everyone privacy setting.  We may also make information about the location of your computer or access device and your age available to applications and websites in order to help them implement appropriate security measures and control the distribution of age-appropriate content.  If the application or website wants to access any other data, it will have to ask for your permission.

We give you tools to control how your information is shared with applications and websites that use Platform.  For example, you can block specific applications from accessing your information by visiting your application settings or the application’s “About” page.  You can also use your privacy settings to limit which of your information is available to “everyone”.

You should always review the policies of third party applications and websites to make sure you are comfortable with the ways in which they use information you share with them. We do not guarantee that they will follow our rules. If you find an application or website that violates our rules, you should report the violation to us on this help page and we will take action as necessary.

When your friends use Platform.  If your friend connects with an application or website, it will be able to access your name, profile picture, gender, user ID, and information you have shared with “everyone.”  It will also be able to access your connections, except it will not be able to access your friend list.  If you have already connected with (or have a separate account with) that website or application, it may also be able to connect you with your friend on that application or website.  If the application or website wants to access any of your other content or information (including your friend list), it will have to obtain specific permission from your friend.  If your friend grants specific permission to the application or website, it will generally only be able to access content and information about you that your friend can access.  In addition, it will only be allowed to use that content and information in connection with that friend.  For example, if a friend gives an application access to a photo you only shared with your friends, that application could allow your friend to view or print the photo, but it cannot show that photo to anyone else.

We provide you with a number of tools to control how your information is shared when your friend connects with an application or website.  For example, you can use your application privacy settings to limit some of the information your friends can make available to applications and websites.  You can also block particular applications or websites from accessing your information.  You can use your privacy settings to limit which friends can access your information, or limit which of your information is available to “everyone.”  You can also disconnect from a friend if you are uncomfortable with how they are using your information.

Pre-Approved Third-Party Websites and Applications.  In order to provide you with useful social experiences off of Facebook, we occasionally need to provide General Information about you to pre-approved third party websites and applications that use Platform at the time you visit them (if you are still logged in to Facebook).   Similarly, when one of your friends visits a pre-approved website or application, it will receive General Information about you so you and your friend can be connected on that website as well (if you also have an account with that website).   In these cases we require these websites and applications to go through an approval process, and to enter into separate agreements designed to protect your privacy.  For example, these agreements include provisions relating to the access and deletion of your General Information, along with your ability to opt-out of the experience being offered.  You can also remove any pre-approved website or application you have visited here [add link], or block all pre-approved websites and applications from getting your General Information when you visit them here [add link].    In addition, if you log out of Facebook before visiting a pre-approved application or website, it will not be able to access your information.  You can see a complete list of pre-approved websites on our About Platform page.

Exporting Information. You (and those you make your information available to) may use tools like RSS feeds, mobile phone address book applications, or copy and paste functions, to capture, export (and in some cases, import) information from Facebook, including your information and information about you.  For example, if you share your phone number with your friends, they may use third party applications to sync that information with the address book on their mobile phone.

Advertisements. Sometimes the advertisers who present ads on Facebook use technological methods to measure the effectiveness of their ads and to personalize advertising content. You may opt-out of the placement of cookies by many of these advertisers here. You may also use your browser cookie settings to limit or prevent the placement of cookies by advertising networks.

Links. When you click on links on Facebook you may leave our site. We are not responsible for the privacy practices of other sites, and we encourage you to read their privacy statements.

5. How We Use Your Information

We use the information we collect to try to provide a safe, efficient, and customized experience. Here are some of the details on how we do that:

To manage the service. We use the information we collect to provide our services and features to you, to measure and improve those services and features, and to provide you with customer support. We use the information to prevent potentially illegal activities, and to enforce our Statement of Rights and Responsibilities. We also use a variety of technological systems to detect and address anomalous activity and screen content to prevent abuse such as spam. These efforts may on occasion result in a temporary or permanent suspension or termination of some functions for some users.

To contact you. We may contact you with service-related announcements from time to time. You may opt out of all communications except essential updates on your account notifications page. We may include content you see on Facebook in the emails we send to you.

To serve personalized advertising to you. We don’t share your information with advertisers without your consent. (An example of consent would be if you asked us to provide your shipping address to an advertiser to receive a free sample.) We allow advertisers to choose the characteristics of users who will see their advertisements and we may use any of the non-personally identifiable attributes we have collected (including information you may have decided not to show to other users, such as your birth year or other sensitive personal information or preferences) to select the appropriate audience for those advertisements. For example, we might use your interest in soccer to show you ads for soccer equipment, but we do not tell the soccer equipment company who you are. You can see the criteria advertisers may select by visiting our advertising page. Even though we do not share your information with advertisers without your consent, when you click on or otherwise interact with an advertisement there is a possibility that the advertiser may place a cookie in your browser and note that it meets the criteria they selected.

To serve social ads. We occasionally pair advertisements we serve with relevant information we have about you and your friends to make advertisements more interesting and more tailored to you and your friends. For example, if you connect with your favorite band’s page, we may display your name and profile photo next to an advertisement for that page that is displayed to your friends. We only share the personally identifiable information visible in the social ad with the friend who can see the ad. You can opt out of having your information used in social ads on this help page.

To supplement your profile. We may use information about you that we collect from other Facebook users to supplement your profile (such as when you are tagged in a photo or mentioned in a status update). In such cases we generally give you the ability to remove the content (such as allowing you to remove a photo tag of you) or limit its visibility on your profile.

To make suggestions. We use your profile information, the addresses you import through our contact importers, and other relevant information, to help you connect with your friends, including making suggestions to you and other users that you connect with on Facebook. For example, if another user imports the same email address as you do, we may suggest that you connect with each other.  If you want to limit your visibility in suggestions we make to other people, you can adjust your search visibility privacy setting, as you will only be visible in our suggestions to the extent you choose to be visible in public search listings. You may also block specific individual users from being suggested to you and you from being suggested to them.

To help your friends find you. We allow other users to use contact information they have about you, such as your email address, to find you, including through contact importers and search.  You can prevent other users from using your email address to find you using your search setting.

Downloadable Software. Certain downloadable software applications and applets that we offer, such as our browser toolbars and photo uploaders, transmit data to us. We may not make a formal disclosure if we believe our collection of and use of the information is the obvious purpose of the application, such as the fact that we receive photos when you use our photo uploader. If we believe it is not obvious that we are collecting or using such information, we will make a disclosure to you the first time you provide the information to us so that you can decide whether you want to use that feature.

Memorializing Accounts. If we are notified that a user is deceased, we may memorialize the user’s account. In such cases we restrict profile access to confirmed friends, and allow friends and family to write on the user’s Wall in remembrance. We may close an account if we receive a formal request from the user’s next of kin or other proper legal request to do so.

6. How We Share Information

Facebook is about sharing information with others — friends and people in your communities — while providing you with privacy settings that you can use to restrict other users from accessing some of your information. We share your information with third parties when we believe the sharing is permitted by you, reasonably necessary to offer our services, or when legally required to do so. For example:

When you make a payment. When you enter into transactions with others or make payments on Facebook, we will share transaction information with only those third parties necessary to complete the transaction.  We will require those third parties to agree to respect the privacy of your information.

When you invite a friend to join. When you ask us to invite a friend to join Facebook, we will send your friend a message on your behalf using your name.  The invitation may also contain information about other users your friend might know.   We may also send up to two reminders to them in your name. You can see who has accepted your invitations, send reminders, and delete your friends’ email addresses on your invite history page.  If your friend does not want us to keep their information, we will also remove it at their request by using this help page.

When you choose to share your information with marketers. You may choose to share information with marketers or electronic commerce providers that are not associated with Facebook through on-site offers. This is entirely at your discretion and we will not provide your information to these marketers without your consent.

To help your friends find you. By default, we make certain information you have posted to your profile available in search results on Facebook to help your friends find you. However, you can control who can see some of this information, as well as who can find you in searches, through your privacy settings. We also partner with email and instant messaging providers to help their users identify which of their contacts are Facebook users, so that we can promote Facebook to those users.

To give search engines access to publicly available information. We generally limit search engines’ access to our site. We may allow them to access information set to the “everyone” setting (along with your name and profile picture) and your profile information that is visible to everyone.  You can change the visibility of some of your profile information using your privacy settings. You can also prevent search engines from indexing your profile using your search settings.

To help improve or promote our service. Sometimes we share aggregated information with third parties to help improve or promote our service. But we only do so in such a way that no individual user can be identified or linked to any specific action or information.

To provide you with services. We may provide information to service providers that help us bring you the services we offer. For example, we may use third parties to help host our website, send out email updates about Facebook, remove repetitive information from our user lists, process payments, or provide search results or links (including sponsored links). These service providers may have access to your personal information for use for a limited time, but when this occurs we implement reasonable contractual and technical protections to limit their use of that information to helping us provide the service.

To advertise our services. We may ask advertisers outside of Facebook to display ads promoting our services. We may ask them to deliver those ads based on the presence of a cookie, but in doing so will not share any other information with the advertiser.

To offer joint services. We may provide services jointly with other companies, such as the classifieds service in the Facebook Marketplace. If you use these services, we may share your information to facilitate that service. However, we will identify the partner and present the joint service provider’s privacy policy to you before you use that service.

To respond to legal requests and prevent harm. We may disclose information pursuant to subpoenas, court orders, or other requests (including criminal and civil matters) if we have a good faith belief that the response is required by law. This may include respecting requests from jurisdictions outside of the United States where we have a good faith belief that the response is required by law under the local laws in that jurisdiction, apply to users from that jurisdiction, and are consistent with generally accepted international standards. We may also share information when we have a good faith belief it is necessary to prevent fraud or other illegal activity, to prevent imminent bodily harm, or to protect ourselves and you from people violating our Statement of Rights and Responsibilities. This may include sharing information with other companies, lawyers, courts or other government entities.

Transfer in the Event of Sale or Change of Control. If the ownership of all or substantially all of our business changes, we may transfer your information to the new owner so that the service can continue to operate. In such a case, your information would remain subject to the promises made in any pre-existing Privacy Policy.

7. How You Can Change or Remove Information

Editing your profile. You may change or remove your profile information at any time by going to your profile page and clicking “Edit My Profile.” Information will be updated immediately.

Delete uploaded contacts. If you use our contact importer to upload addresses, you can later delete the list on this help page.  You can delete the email addresses of friends you have invited to join Facebook on your invite history page.

Deactivating or deleting your account. If you want to stop using your account you may deactivate it or delete it. When you deactivate an account, no user will be able to see it, but it will not be deleted. We save your profile information (connections, photos, etc.) in case you later decide to reactivate your account. Many users deactivate their accounts for temporary reasons and in doing so are asking us to maintain their information until they return to Facebook. You will still have the ability to reactivate your account and restore your profile in its entirety. When you delete an account, it is permanently deleted from Facebook. You should only delete your account if you are certain you never want to reactivate it. You may deactivate your account on your account settings page or delete your account on this help page.

Limitations on removal. Even after you remove information from your profile or delete your account, copies of that information may remain viewable elsewhere to the extent it has been shared with others, it was otherwise distributed pursuant to your privacy settings, or it was copied or stored by other users. However, your name will no longer be associated with that information on Facebook. (For example, if you post something to another user’s profile and then you delete your account, that post may remain, but be attributed to an “Anonymous Facebook User.”)  Additionally, we may retain certain information to prevent identity theft and other misconduct even if deletion has been requested. If you have given third party applications or websites access to your information, they may retain your information to the extent permitted under their terms of service or privacy policies.  But they will no longer be able to access the information through our Platform after you disconnect from them.

Backup copies. Removed and deleted information may persist in backup copies for up to 90 days, but will not be available to others.

Non-user contact information. If a user provides your email address to us, and you are not a Facebook user but you want us to delete your address, you can do so on this help page. However, that request will only apply to addresses we have at the time of the request and not to any addresses that users provide to us later.

8. How We Protect Information

We do our best to keep your information secure, but we need your help. For more detailed information about staying safe on Facebook, visit the Facebook Security Page.

Steps we take to keep your information secure. We keep your account information on a secured server behind a firewall. When you enter sensitive information (such as credit card numbers and passwords), we encrypt that information using secure socket layer technology (SSL). We also use automated and social measures to enhance security, such as analyzing account behavior for fraudulent or otherwise anomalous behavior, may limit use of site features in response to possible signs of abuse, may remove inappropriate content or links to illegal content, and may suspend or disable accounts for violations of our Statement of Rights and Responsibilities.

Risks inherent in sharing information. Although we allow you to set privacy options that limit access to your information, please be aware that no security measures are perfect or impenetrable. We cannot control the actions of other users with whom you share your information. We cannot guarantee that only authorized persons will view your information. We cannot ensure that information you share on Facebook will not become publicly available. We are not responsible for third party circumvention of any privacy settings or security measures on Facebook. You can reduce these risks by using common sense security practices such as choosing a strong password, using different passwords for different services, and using up to date antivirus software.

Report Violations. You should report any security violations to us on this help page.

9. Other Terms

Changes. We may change this Privacy Policy pursuant to the procedures outlined in the Facebook Statement of Rights and Responsibilities. Unless stated otherwise, our current privacy policy applies to all information that we have about you and your account. If we make changes to this Privacy Policy we will notify you by publication here and on the Facebook Site Governance Page. You can make sure that you receive notice directly by becoming a fan of the Facebook Site Governance Page.

Consent to Collection and Processing in the United States. By using Facebook, you consent to having your personal data transferred to and processed in the United States.

Defined Terms. "Us," "we," "our," "Platform" and "Facebook" mean the same as they do in the Statement of Rights and Responsibilities. “Information” and “content” are used more generally and interchangeably here than in the Statement of Rights and Responsibilities unless otherwise limited by the context.

Helpful links

Statement of Rights and Responsibilities
Facebook Site Governance Page
application settings
privacy settings
account notifications page
help page for complaints about our privacy policies or practices
help page to report use by a child under age 13
help page with info to help parents talk to children about safe internet use
deleting an account
reporting a deceased user
reporting an impostor
reporting abusive content
reporting a compromised account
requesting deletion of data for non-user
removing Friend Finder contacts
reporting and blocking third-party applications
general explanation of third-party applications and how they access data


Facebook Plots its Future: Will it Be Our Overlord?

I always thought of Facebook as a place to visit when I had time to kill, but that’s not what the people behind the social network want it to be.

Peter Smith

Apr 22, 2010 9:00 am
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I have to confess, Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook are confusing the heck out of me. (That confusion might come out in this post, so I apologize in advance.) I watched the keynote from the F8 conference yesterday, and it was like Zuckerberg was talking about a different service from the one I think of when I think of Facebook.

Now maybe I'm missing something, but to me Facebook is a place to go to kill time. I talk to people I haven't seen since high school, delete spam from a lot of games my friends are playing, and get invited to all kinds of events taking place hundreds or thousands of miles from my house. From time to time I check out someone's new pictures or what have you. It's fun enough, but I never really think of it as a service. To me, Facebook is a place.

[ Get news and reviews on tech toys in ITworld's personal tech newsletter]

Zuckerberg clearly sees Facebook as a service. Facebook Connect, (the name), is going away and being replaced by the Facebook Platform. "Share on Facebook" buttons are being replaced with "Like on Facebook" buttons. And Comcast is now called Xfinity... what does it all mean to the end user? There's a new API to fetch data from Facebook more easily, which sounds great, if only I could figure out why I'd want to do that. The overall tone of the keynote was that Facebook was serious business and they were going to build the Social Graph, a vast network of connections between people and the things they like. Zuckerberg was a man with a mission.

And then later in the day they talk about Facebook Credits, a virtual currency to use in your Facebook games (and other Facebook apps). Clearly Facebook takes its position as a game and chat platform fairly seriously. So is it a game platform, or is it the underpinnings of the Social Graph?

This seeming dichotomy reminded me of a post I'd read at VentureBeat. In it, Zynga (of Farmville fame) CEO Mark Pincus talks about his hopes for the future of Facebook. He points out that Facebook can focus on being a portal or a platform. Pincus, for obvious reasons, is just thinking games. I think the questions he asks apply in a much broader sense. Is Facebook going to be a toy or a service? Can it be both?

Another announcement today was the launch of docs.com. This is a Microsoft/Facebook venture; an online version of Microsoft Office that you log into via Facebook Connect Platform. An online version of Office is welcome (my application got approved too late last night to dig into it, but from a cursory glance the service seems capable), but what's the benefit of the Facebook tie-in? What happened to Microsoft Passport, or Live ID, or whatever they're calling it these days? For years Microsoft has been trying to build this single sign-on system for web services. Now suddenly we're supposed to abandon that and get a Facebook account to sign into Microsoft services?

Apparently you can share docs.com documents with other Facebook users. Again, maybe I'm looking at this situation from a much too personal point of view, but none of the people I need to share documents with are my Facebook friends. Nor do I really want to mix Friending business associates with the guys that I used to skip gym class with in order to go skateboarding. I prefer to keep my professional and personal lives more or less separate.

Some of the examples of this new world of Facebook are interesting at first glance. Take music and Pandora as an example. The idea here is that as you surf around the web and encounter bands on different sites and services, you can click a Facebook "Like" button if you like the band. Then when you hit Pandora, it polls Facebook's new Graph API to find out all the bands you've Liked and then starts playing music it thinks you'll enjoy, based on this data. From a geek point of view that's kind of cool, but my inner privacy advocate feels a little uneasy about it. Plus, I think I'd much prefer going to Pandora and telling it what I feel like listening to, rather than vice versa.

I dug into this a bit, tried putting a Like button on my personal blog. I can see where Zuckerberg is going. He wants us to back up the Like buttons with metatags (Webmonkey has a quick and easy tutorial on this) and so collect more data on us than just the fact that we Liked a particular page. Once again my techie side finds this kind of interesting but I'm uncomfortable with the privacy aspects. Will I have to view the source of a web page before I click that "Like" button just to be sure the site is accurately reflecting my opinions? Are there going to be limitations on who can poll this data? How granular will my privacy options be? Consider this feature is deployed right now, so think before you Like.

Once again I apologize if this post is more disjointed than usual. I'm still scratching my head about everything that was revealed at the F8 conference yesterday, and I don't think I'll really understand it all until I build some more sample pages for adding to and extracting info from the Social Graph. If you want to do the same, Facebook's Developer site is a good place to get started.

Or maybe we should just all buy a bunch of Facebook Credits and go back to playing Farmville. I'll fertilize your fields if you fertilize mine!





Facebook Open Graph: What it Means for Privacy

At Facebook’s F8 Developer Conference today, the company fleshed out its plans to become the social center of the web. With the new Open Graph API and protocol and the ability to integrate websites and web apps within your existing social network, the platform will become more robust than ever before.

The potential for this new technology is great — which is why partners like Yelp (Yelp), Pandora (Pandora) and Microsoft have already jumped on board. But what does all of this interconnected data mean for user privacy?

Privacy has always been a bit of a thorny issue for Facebook and its users. In November of 2007, Facebook’s Beacon advertising experiment resulted in a class-action lawsuit, and Facebook’s big privacy overhaul in December provoked immediate criticism. The company’s more recent change to privacy settings for Facebook apps has been better received, but the user response to Mark Zuckerberg’s “public is the new social norm” stance has already forced the company to overhaul its privacy policy again — this time with user input.

Now that sites and apps can better integrate directly with Facebook (Facebook) in more than just a tangential way, the potential for privacy issues grows substantially.


What Is Changing?


In the past, apps that accessed data from the Facebook APIs could only store that data for 24 hours. This meant that apps and app developers would have to download user information day after day, just to keep up with the policy. Now the data storage restriction is gone, so if you tell an app it can store your data, it can keep it without worrying about what was basically an arbitrary technical hurdle.

While this might sound scary, it doesn’t actually impact how developers can use user data, just how long they can store it. Again, many developers were just hacking around this policy anyway, so users shouldn’t notice any changes.

Facebook is also getting rid of its Facebook Connect branding. Instead, Facebook login modules will be available to site owners, and users can not only log in or sign up for a service, but can also see how many of their friends have also signed up for the site.

Now, this new feature is cool — as is the universal Likes and customized content additions — but it also makes what you designate as “public” potentially more public.

While the login boxes and activity feeds that appear on websites will be customized for each user (meaning that what I see on a page will differ from what fellow reporter Jenn Van Grove sees), this information is potentially more easily viewable than it was before. It’s not like your Facebook friends couldn’t see this information in the past, it’s just now a lot more contextual and available in more places.


Privacy Will Become the User’s Responsibility


I took a look at the different documentation of the Open Graph API and the different social plugins, and gathered that the data collection and overall privacy settings don’t differ from what has already been available. Again, what changes is how that data can be displayed to different people and how it can be integrated in different ways.

Nevertheless, it is imperative that users who have concerns about privacy make sure they read and understand what information they are making available to applications before using them. Users need to be aware that when they “Like” an article on CNN, that “Like” may show up on a customized view that their friends see.

Public no longer means “public on Facebook,” it means “public in the Facebook ecosystem.” Some companies, like Pandora, are going to go to great lengths to allow users to separate or opt out of linking their Pandora and Facebook accounts together, but users can’t expect all apps and sites to take that approach. My advice to you: Be aware of your privacy settings.

What isn’t yet clear is if there will be any granular permissions for public data. For instance, I might want to share that I “Like” a CNN.com article with a certain group of people, but not make it public to my entire social graph. For now, users need to assume that if you do something that is considered public, that action can potentially end up on a customized stream for everyone in your social graph.


How Facebook Can Avoid Getting Burned


Because there aren’t really any changes in policy with the Open Graph system, Facebook will likely avoid any massive privacy violations; after all, if you agreed to make something public, it’s public. However, as Google learned with Google Buzz, users aren’t always aware of their default privacy settings.

Facebook can offset a lot of confusion and concern by doing a good job of educating users about the meaning of “public” and how the personalized feeds will work on various websites.

Developers can also help by making what information they collect and what information can be shared throughout the social graph more accessible and easier to understand.

Right now, it really doesn’t look like Open Graph will have any technical changes to Facebook user privacy. That said, the nature of how public information can be linked across different sites is now more robust, which makes it that much more important for the privacy-concerned to read the fine print.

What do you think of the privacy implications with Open Graph? Let us know!