On Wed, 2010-06-23 at 00:39 -0400, Matt Lee wrote: > ## Scenario 2: Robin. > > Robin is a typical social networking user -- she has her friends and > family on her network, including people she'd rather ignore. She does > her best to keep up to date with Facebook's ever changing privacy > policy and privacy setting changes, but often fails in this task, > exposing her innermost thoughts to people she's too polite to delete > from her network.
This is a very good start. It should behoove the project to make the default settings to max-yet-usable privacy levels. From personal experience, the "common" nontechnical user (think little sibling, mom and dad, etc.) has no idea or interest to learn about privacy settings; if he or she has even the vaguest notion of privacy to begin with. From a design perspective, for "common" users, the privacy issue should be out of their way and out of their radar. After all, nontechnical users are the most vulnerable to the current social networks that exploit their data. Most users just click "OK" on everything just to get to wherever they're going on the site. When privacy advocates cry foul, the current nonfree social networks can say, "Oh, but it was clearly stated on section 500, subsection 80-D of the TOS/Privacy Policy—conveniently located on our site's Legalese Alchemy Dungeon—that by clicking 'OK' the user agrees to whatever we say, even if we change our mind every 10 minutes; the user just didn't read it!" I don't mean this in a derogatory sense, but we have to seriously think about default settings for the "lowest common denominator" of the user spectrum, i.e., crank up the privacy. Conversely, for us technical users, going into the settings and loosening up the default super private defaults would be no big deal. Keep up the good work! -- Luis A. Morán Morales http://identi.ca/lamm
