Facebook uproar
danah boyd: As Fred Stutzman noted, Facebook Broke Its Culture this week. In an attempt to provide something that would make people’s lives easier, they created a privacy trainwreck.
Both my kids have Facebooks. Both my kids don’t like the Mini-Feed changes. But what I hear from my kids is a quite different story than what I see out on the blogosphere.
Neither of my kids are concerned about the privacy implications. Not one bit. They are quite happy with the privacy controls made available to them.
They simply don’t want to be pelted with notifications that Suzy Classmate went from Single to “It’s complicated” or Joe Acquaintance joined the group “CHANGE FACEBOOK BACK”.
Now it seems that Mark Zuckerberg bowed to public pressure and allowed users to control what they publish. What I don’t see yet is the ability for people to control what level of notifications that they are subscribed to.
A while back, I stopped using every social networking tool. I still get invites (mostly from LinkedIn), which I ignore. I suspect that it is this same level of granularity which I seek. I don’t care of the whole world knows my employment status or marital status, but the set of people for which I care about changes in employment status and the set of people for which I care about changes in marital status don’t completely overlap.