Facebook Privacy Settings Sometimes Have Unintended Consequences
There is a privacy setting within Facebook that allows you to keep people who are not your friends from seeing who your friends are. For some intensely private people, that setting is an excellent way of protecting friend connections from spammers and scammers.
But it has an unintended consequence, which our speaker Rodney Rumford delineated here. When you send someone a friend request on Facebook, 9 times out of 10 the friend request lists how many friends you have in common with that person. But, if you don’t let non-friends see who your friends are, the system can’t show them your mutual friends.
This strikes me as an oversight on Facebook’s part. If I send someone a friend request, I give them access to a special limited profile. That profile information ought to include mutual friends unless you specifically request otherwise with a separate privacy setting.
Update: And in any case, a request from a potential friend who has chosen to withhold mutual friend information should provide the user with that information. That way truthful people won’t wind up looking like bald-faced liars when they are not.
Of course, the larger problem with Facebook’s privacy settings is that they are growing ever more convoluted as they grow more granular. If I were Mark Zuckerberg, I’d bring in a usability expert to figure out how to simplify the whole system. It’s starting to look like the U.S. tax code.
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Hey Teresa, I just posted this on Rodney’s blog. I hope it’s ok to repeat it here…
Thinking about this a little further, I don’t think that Pokes, Messages and Friend Requests should share the same privacy settings.
I changed the settings for these many months ago. I would receive pokes and messages from people I didn’t recognize… and when I messaged them to ask if I knew them, I didn’t necessarily want them to see everything in my profile — including friends. So I kept the settings to a bare minimum.
When Facebook added the feature a few weeks back to allow us to see mutual friends on friend requests, I thought it was great. Based on the mutual friends, I could now see when a blank friend request was coming from someone who was simply networking on Facebook, and not someone I met at a specific event.
By then, I had completely forgotten about my changed privacy settings. Besides, I wouldn’t have made the connection if it hadn’t been for Stalinslav’s reply on [Rodney's] other post. That made me look into it.
It’d be nice — but probably complicated — if Facebook would distinguish between the privacy settings these 3 features (pokes, messages and friend requests). I don’t want to hide anything from friend requests, but I don’t necessarily want to open everything up when sending messages to people not in my list of friends.
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