You know what the internet needs more of? Posts complaining about Facebook privacy. It’s not like every morning you wake up to the news telling you about how your personal information is being collected and baked into a pie that someone will eat one day so as to devour your very existence. That is essentially a delicious metaphor playing off of the general population’s fear of both Top Chef and The Net coming to life, illustrating just one reason I experienced great frustration in finding support for my crowdfunding project about creating mashups of two mediocre things so that they can be rendered into something terrible.
Refocusing, I would like to point out a slight bit of exposure of your personal information on the ol’ FB through an anecdote. One of my colleagues was a little surprised to find out that a Page she liked could see posts from her personal Facebook profile. But, how? These posts were not public, and she was not directly friended to the Page admin. This lead me to engage in a little snooping on my own. If you are familiar with Facebook Pages, you know that admins can step into the role of the Page and essentially see Facebook information from the Page’s perspective. As it turns out, I could see quite a number of things as the New Leaf Page that this colleague didn’t know was viewable by the public.
“Yeah, but you’re FB friends,” you might say. Indeed, but I didn’t see the wealth of information available to me from my personal profile. I only saw some recent posts and a glut of posts from about three years or so ago. “Yeah, but she’s an admin on the New Leaf Page and connected to it that way,” you might say. Well, I can tell you that friends of mine who like the Page (including my wife) are not, and I could see way more information than they bargained for. In fact, due to the tight lockdown of my own privacy settings, I can tell you the information that should be seen is much more limited. What should be viewable is essentially what Facebook treats as publicly available information in this instance. From my observation, that specifically includes what other Pages you like, changes to your cover and profile photos, (seemingly random) friendings, and (if you post this information) your education and work experience. The information I saw on other profiles went way beyond that, and much older posts were far more ubiquitous. “Yeah, but they’re your friends,” you might say. Then, why would I see more information viewing their profiles as New Leaf than I saw viewing my own profile as New Leaf? Like I said, my security settings are close to as tight as they can be. If New Leaf can’t see that same information for me, then it’s not a backdoor-Page-admin-friend loophole. It’s something odd about each individual’s security settings.
But, I didn’t come here to just drop problems on you. The solution is rather simple, though I am somewhat at a loss for how it works. Go to your privacy settings, look for the setting to limit the audience for posts, click Limit Past Posts, and click Limit Old Posts (official instructions are here). While that certainly makes sense for the glut of old posts I could see as a Page, it does significantly less to explain why I could see more current posts that were not intended to be public. Despite what Facebook thinks it knows about what you’ve posted in the past, I would wager that Pages (a feature that didn’t exist at the time of most of the relevant posts) were never your intended audience. By tweaking this setting though, those posts are no longer viewable when I go to my friends’ profiles as the New Leaf Page. Thus, you can sleep a little easier if you make this change.
“Yeah, and what does this have to do with law,” you might ask. Perhaps you’ve been unaware of the repeated class action lawsuits over let’s just say privacy of information (and not everything under the sun). Maybe it’s because you didn’t go to law school and get trained in Parseltongue (joke credit: The Rev. Sir Doctor Sen. Stephen T. Mos Def Colbert, D.F.A., Heavyweight Champion of the World), but you can start ticking the days before you as a Facebook user get a notice about some class action suit on this subject. What you need to know as such a user is that you should be aware of how your information is being used because it is valuable to people who operate websites and the occasional rogue elements out there. And, you should know that not everything a site like Facebook does is intended to take advantage of you. Sometimes, mistakes like this happen.
If you operate a website where you handle information, then you need three things: 1) top of the line programming to see that unintended consequences like this are nil (or reasonably minimized), 2) airtight terms and conditions and a privacy policy informing users of how their information is used and what happens when things go sideways, and 3) insurance. We can help with point 2, which is managing that risk between where point 1 fails and point 3 takes over. And, if it can happen to a site like Facebook with its almost infinite programming resources, it can happen to yours too.
