Facebook is a giant, when we talk about social networking sites and like every giant, it faces criticism. Its biggest criticism has been ‘security’. Time and again, security holes are filled, but it cannot be secured completely. Facebook can just guide users to be more secured in their approach. It is even the responsibility of the users to take part in securing their profile, images and other posts on the social network. Referring to the said case, Facebook CTO Bret Taylor said that the site is much more secured now as most Facebook users are now aware of the privacy settings in the first place.
Facebook had many representatives willing to talk about about the social networking giant at the Web 2.0 Summit, held last week. Those following the summit, noticed Ben Horowitz, Sean Parker and Bret Taylor making noticeable statements about Facebook, which included debunking the myth that most Facebook users never change their default privacy settings.
Briefing his thoughts for around 15 minutes, but All Facebook managed to collect a few very interesting quotes transcribed. Here’s what he said about privacy:
The majority of people on Facebook have modified their privacy settings. I think the people who use Facebook a lot are very, very aware of privacy settings. They know exactly what their current boyfriend or ex can see. As our service has grown, there’s a lot of increasing scrutiny on how we provide our service. If we can make your privacy controls so transparent that you are comfortable with sharing data on Facebook, that’s good. We certainly hope to make the privacy settings as accessible as possible.
Two months ago, Facebook had opted to improve its privacy controls, making it easier for the users to restrict sharing their profile as well as restricting posts, as to with whom they are sharing the content. This feature shared similarity with ‘Circles’ on Google Plus.
Talking about the conference, there was a question posted for Taylor, regarding Facebook allowing data transfer from the social network to Google+. Taylor acknowledged it as a good question as he responded saying:
I think data portability is interesting because it’s very easy in the context of single-user services. Bringing your data elsewhere is simple then. It gets complex with the intersection of several features. And an example of that is the address book on Facebook. If I put my contacts there and put privacy settings on, what are my rights? Should you have the ability to take that data to another site with different privacy?
Taylor was even grilled on the ‘famously infamous’ Timeline feature of Facebook. The question had its focus on the Activity Log, on which he briefed everyone saying:
Activity log is a new feature, part of our timeline. It’s a private page that’s the backend of your timeline, all content you’ve shared on Facebook for all time. You can browse it, and navigate by time. It’s a single place on Facebook where you can see all your information. If we can give people granularity over the control of sharing data, the more these products will see. If you’re going for a job interview, you can go back and change photos of yourself posted in college. A lot of that was there before but we made it more accessible.
There was even a question in the box, which had Taylor sparing a thought. He was asked about Napster co-founder Sean Parker’s recent statements which read ‘Facebook’s power users have gone to Twitter, Google+’. He tricked an answer, which was quite expected:
People who were in college when Facebook was only available to students make up the power users; Facebook is very concerned about addressing their needs for nuanced controls and features. He worries that Facebook has moved toward complexity too often. Smart friend lists have been well received. Subscribe is also designed to reach a broad audience. Our news feed is really good at finding you the most engaging content. The folks who have turned on subscribe have seen unprecedented levels of engagement. I’m really bullish about that feature because it has a lot of potential to reach all 800 million users.
Taylor’s response to each and every question was remarkable and like Facebook co-founder CEO Mark Zuckerberg, he did a decent job of answering the questions smartly.