This afternoon I was reading an editorial piece
by Adam Cohen in the New York Times. Adam makes a great point about the
need for granular privacy settings, “Users should be asked if they want
information to be viewable by others, and by whom: Their friends?
Everyone in the world? Privacy settings, which allow for this kind of
screening, should be prominent, clear and easily managed.”

What I’m a little confused about is why he said Facebook hasn’t made
enough steps to empower users to control their privacy settings.
Currently, Facebook offers the most granular privacy controls of any
website. The existing problem is not with Facebook but instead with
users’ identities across the web. The interesting part of this is that
suddenly bloggers, journalists and the general web community appear to
believe that privacy controls are something they have a right to and it
should be included with all websites.

Aside from the Beacon fiasco, I’m not quite sure why Facebook
receives all the blame for failure to provide granular privacy
settings. In fact they are one of the few sites that provide such
detailed selections. Regardless of whether or not Cohen made an
appropriate accusation, we are headed toward a virtual world in which
we have more granular controls across all the websites that we
participate in. As communication between the multiple services that we
use becomes commonplace we will see the emergence of the identity
control panel.

We have yet to determine the exact location of that control panel.
Right now sites like Facebook and FriendFeed appear to be ideal
locations for managing our identity privacy controls. Just as there is
a race to develop a singular Social Graph API, I think the next step is
a standard for expressing our privacy settings. While I may be ahead of
myself on this one, a basic level of privacy settings (make certain
friends private, others public) should be eventually build into the
social graph API.

Of course a standard for identity management needs to be adopted
prior to a standard for privacy. Something eventually needs to get put
in place though. I previously suggested that perhaps this is where
government should step in. What do you think? Should there be a global privacy standard?

Repost from The Social Times