BETA
This is a BETA experience. You may opt-out by clicking here

More From Forbes

Edit Story

Despite FTC Settlement, Facebook Still Playing Coy on Privacy

This article is more than 10 years old.

Sheryl Sandberg. Image via CrunchBase

How sincere was Facebook's public mea culpa over its deceptive privacy practices? You know, the one where Mark Zuckerberg, after a bit of arm-twisting by the FTC, admitted, "We've made a lot of mistakes" and promised to do better?

Here's one way to gauge it: Two days after that concession, Zuckerberg's number two, COO Sheryl Sandberg, is already fudging the facts on Facebook's approach to privacy and the lack of transparency around it.

During an interview Thursday morning at the Business Insider Ignition conference, BI editor in chief Henry Blodget complained about the unwanted consequences of adding a social layer to news. Blodget pointed to the sudden introduction in 2009 of Huffington Post Social News, which allowed all of his Facebook friends to see all the articles he was reading on the Huffington Post. Blodget said he didn't necessarily want his friends to know about every article he had read. Yet a wave of news-reading apps introduced in September as part of Facebook's new media platform do exactly that, he noted.

Sandberg replied that the privacy permissions around an app like the Washington Post Social Reader are perfectly clear. "If you go to authenticate and log in, it says, 'This app will share everything you read with your friends. Do you want to do that?'" she said.

"Certainly, there are times users do it and they don't understand," she added. "We have 800 million users and they're not all going to understand. But we work really hard to make sure people understand what they're sharing."

Hmm. As I reported back in September when the Washington Post Social Reader debuted, the sharing settings are anything but clear. Here's what you see when you first log in to the app:

Under "Custom," I set the permissions to "Only Me" and assumed that meant no one else would be able to see what I was reading. I continued to think that until a Washington Post spokeswoman explained that, in fact, there's no way to turn off sharing inside the app, except on an article-by-article basis; choosing "Only Me" merely ensures that your Facebook friends don't get notifications in their timelines or tickers. (For what it's worth, the fine distinction here seems to be over whether or not the sharing within the app, which lives in the Facebook environment, is sharing "on Facebook." Angels and pinheads.) That this is how sharing actually works certainly isn't clear on the first-time log-in screen. It's not even really terribly clear on this page laying out the privacy policy.

It's obvious that Facebook is continuing to make the same bet it always makes: that, by making it ever easier to share and ever harder and more confusing not to share, it can induce people to offer up more information than they'd really like to. As I've said, I don't really consider stacking the deck in favor of passive sharing in this way a privacy nightmare. But to say Facebook is working "really hard to make sure people understand what they're sharing," and that it's just a few obtuse users who aren't getting it, doesn't exactly smack of newfound humility.