How do you limit your privacy? There's a fantastic South Park episode called 'You have zero friends' which perfectly, perfectly highlights the plight, if you like, of being on facebook. You're sat there and you're in a bar with Bill and you say, 'You're on facebook, I'll add you later.' Fine okay, you and Bill become friends and that's great, you like each other's statuses, whatever but then you're on your phone to your parents that night and they go, 'Oh Auntie Jane added you on facebook, why haven't you accepted?' and then all of a sudden because you have this profile you're torn.
Yeah you wanna be friends voluntarily with all these people and then you're obliged on the other hand to be friends with certain other people. You don't necessarily want to share with Auntie Jane all of your drunken Friday nights out that you would want to share with your other friends, perhaps your housemates. And so this gets incredibly complex and you end up making some fantastic arguments with people over things, removing friends or blocking people, whatever else. It can be a complete minefield at times with privacy settings.
But was the problem caused when they tried to wipe the board clean and they said, 'All information will be open by default' in other words the people who you don't want to see certain things will just, unless you choose an alternative privacy setting, the information is public and I think that's what caused the problem, wasn't it?
Yeah I think it's along those lines, they changed it one way or the other, I can't remember for definite but yeah they basically said 'Right you're gonna have to opt in to your own security or opt out of it.'
That's right, it was opt in to the security but on top of that and for a page design which is normally so clear and easy to use and instant, to actually go in and amend your profile was very complicated and even for us IT and CS students it required a lot of brain power to do it so your poor man in the street trying to manage that situation, they did have a lot of criticism and rightly so.
You get to the stage where something becomes so complex you think 'Why bother?' and I think a lot of people say 'Can I really be arsed with this? No.'