Online networking privacy is a huge concern right now, especially for Facebook and Google. Both companies have been facing a good amount of backlash for some of their recent product launches, including the new Facebook and Google Buzz. With all the ado about privacy concerns, both Facebook and Google are taking steps to regain user trust and deal with the can of worms they opened.
Facebook, which revealed a new set of default privacy settings late last year, has spent the last few weeks amending the rather open sharing policies that the new site features. This week, the social network has updated the privacy settings around third party apps, letting users determine settings for individual apps. Before, you could set the privacy settings for all third party Facebook apps, essentially making them all equal in how they’re shared throughout your social graph. Now, you can manage settings for each individual app, indicating how you want each app to interact via your Facebook profile.
The change is quite similar to what Facebook did with profile postings, which first had overarching settings as well. Now you’re able to have a more detailed set of options for individual posts shared on your profile wall, meaning each item shared comes with its own privacy settings. In all, it appears that Facebook is reverting to a more customizable approach to sharing on Facebook, creating standards around each item shared instead of the standards being focused on your relationship standing with other users.
Combining the two major facets of socializing on Facebook, users are able to manage their relationships through their sharing activity, which is more fluid and realistic to the way in which our relationships play out in life. It’s a tight rope walk, for sure, but it’s Facebook’s thing. Returning to that principle is likely a good move for Facebook.
Hopefully Google Buzz can learn a lesson or two from Facebook’s recent mistakes. The public default settings have caused a huge uproar and even a class action law suit, which Google now has to deal with. Google has already made changes to the way in which Google Buzz interacts with your email contacts, though it may have a few additional tweaks to make in order to reach a happy medium for its own objectives and the desires of its users.
That happy medium is what makes things to tricky to navigate for the likes of FAcebook and Google. In pushing out new features that will help the companies reach their ultimate goals and achieve higher monetization, th consumers are sometimes left wondering why things have changed so drastically and with what seems to be little regard for their own concerns.
Facebook knows first hand how this can affect a company’s relationship with its user base, as its news feed feature first received a great deal of backlash but soon became a primary means of communicating the stories of our personal lives. Figuring out when a company knows better than its consumers is a tough problem to work out, so we’re likely to see ongoing changes made to Facebook and Google’s integrated Apps as users continue to recognize the compromises they’re making for the convenience of centralized social networking activity.