I’ve been looking at many social apps that don’t let users control their privacy or don’t encourage it. As users we produce information on-line all the time and that information is pushed to our friends, followers or connections in a way we can’t control. In this past year I’ve became all pro user control. The users need to be in charge of the experience they are having and we need to let them take control in order to make it the best. Many services provide some sort of control, but this control is far from what users really want or could use.
In Facebook you either decide (or decided, haven’t checked if they already changed this) if your profile is public for all to see or only to your friends. Of course, you can choose what parts of your profile to share in Public and what parts not to. What about your friends? You often friend people that you have to friend (like your in-laws or your boss) and you don’t like them to be able to watch all of your updates. A user controlled privacy setting will allow us to choose who will see what updates and who will not. This also works so we don’t spam some friends with information that they don’t want to or need to know. For example if I’m organizing a Party I’ll create an event and choose to share it with the friends that are in Lima,Peru. The ones that aren’t don’t need to see that,because they can’t come (Facebook has this feature). Another example will be if I’m sharing links about Social Media on Facebook I’ll like my contacts who like Social Media or have an interest in it to be able to watch them (and don’t send them to my mom). Of course, we can do this with groups but going to the group page and sharing there and then following it adds a bit friction to the process.
Wordpress CMS provides this control by letting us lock a post with a password so only certain people can see it. The problem is many other services think that the default should be public data and that’s not what we like. Of course, it benefits us to make some data public because then we can connect with friends, get advice or meet new people. But we are not comfortable putting all our data for the whole world to find ( or Google to index).
Share more, not less
Having control over those settings in a much more flexible way will help us share more. How?
It’s simple. If we can control with who we share information, rather than just deciding to make it public or private, we will share some of the information that it’s private now (or not even posted) with some people we trust and therefore be sharing more of our data with people that may like it or find it useful. The problem here is that the common believe is that public means more sharing and that’s not always true. Some Public and some Private allows us to share more information and make our relationships evolve naturally. Human relationships grow as trust is created and we are inclined to share more, but if the social apps or services won’t let us then we’ll limit what we share.
Sharing more has benefits in many ways. For example, being able to share medical data can help us get feedback from other patients or doctors we trust. In the case of Doctors we need someone we trust and has a valid opinion, because we can come across some doctors that perform doubtful methods or even be spammed (as happens on twitter a lot) by doubtful sites that sell medicines. In the case of shopping information there’s stuff we shop (you know what you shop that you can’t share) that we just can’t share with others or that we will just want to share with some friends.
Ask for it!
Rather than asking for a privacy or hide option we should have the ability to choose to share something publicly, selectively or not share at all. As users we are entitled to ask for this options in order to control the information we share and be able to improve our experience. And as good service providers all this sites should be willing to let control our privacy settings when this would help UX rather than make it worse. (Twitter does this already, you have Public, Private updates and DM — a group feature will add some complexity). This can also come to reality through a project like Mine! which intends to create a place from where we can control our information.
