Trumblog

Yesterday Facebook rolled out the new privacy controls that they announced over the summer.  But before I get into the issue about the privacy controls that I am interested in I want you to know from the start that if you are looking for grousing about the privacy policy this is not the post that you are looking for.

The issue that I immediately began to check out is how status updates that are made visible to “everyone” are treated.  This summer when the privacy controls were announced I speculated that this would be a real game changer with Twitter, where status updates are broadcast to everyone by default.  I felt that with the variety of privacy options for status updates allowing me to have some Facebook status updates visible to my friends only and other Facebook status updates broadcast to everyone I would be less likely to use Twitter.

So this afternoon when I received the notification that the privacy control changes had come to my profile I began playing around with the privacy controls for status updates.  If you don’t know how to do that, here’s a brief primer.

With the new privacy controls when you write a status update you can select who can select the privacy level for that particular update and therefore determine who can see it.  This is done by clicking the lock icon below and to the right of the status update input field and then selecting who you want to be able to view it from the drop down menu.  As you can see below there are some general categories,  customizable levels of privacy and the bold category is your preferred level of privacy, which you can see I hve customized.

My question in looking at this was “how is Facebook displaying status updates that can be viewed by everyone?‘  The answer seems to be that they aren’t.

I assumed that these updates would appear somewhere on the page with my custom url that I also set up yesterday.  I also hoped that there would be an RSS feed of these public status updates that I could then feed into Twitter.  Unfortunately that does not seem to be the case.

In the screen shots above of my custom url and public facebook page despite having made several status updates with the privacy set to “everyone” no status updates are displayed. In addition there is no RSS feed of status updates to “everyone” or of any other kind available on these pages or my profile page (interestingly there are hacks so that friends can set up a feed of your status updates, but none where you can access your own).

Perhaps the everyone status updates will appear in time as will the RSS feeds.   However it feels like a significant gaffe to have one of the features where the new privacy policy is useful and can benefit us and Facebook not implemented along with the other updates to blunt the inevitable community backlash to any change.

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