It may seem like an impossible task to keep up with all the Twitter apps that have come to market as of late. Even though you have plenty of directories to help with the process, we noticed that it’s still difficult to ascertain which apps support multiple accounts.

As more and more people are using Twitter () for personal and professional reasons, the demand for a Twitter client to match those multifaceted needs is rising. Here are several options to help you tweet now or later from different accounts on your desktop, via the Web, and while on the run. We’ve also included a few browser add-ons and business-specific clients to help you find the right application to suit your Twittering needs.

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Desktop

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Nambu: A great single or mutli-column app for multiple Twitter, Identi.ca, and Laconi.ca account management. Nambu also includes Twitter trends, saved searches, filters, link aggregation, and groups. Plus, if you have a Nambu account you can use tr.im to shorten URLs, and pic.im for better Twitter photo tools than Twitpic ().

Seesmic Desktop: A viable threat to TweetDeck, Seesmic Desktop () has no limitations on the number of accounts you can manage. Plus, since it fully integrates with Facebook, and also allows for unlimited columns, it’s a fantastic way to engage with Twitter from your desktop.

Twhirl: Even though Seesmic Desktop is the replacement desktop application for Twhirl (), it still continues to dominate the TwitStat Twitter client leader board (currently in the number 5 slot). Users love having multiple account support and a single column view of tweets. Also of note is cross-posting to Ping ().fm, and the ability to record and follow Seesmic () videos.

Tweetie () for Mac: This single column gem launched with a bang, thanks the popularity of their mobile app. We’re mad about Tweetie for Mac’s sleek design, which does an amazing job at multiple account management while respecting our screen real-estate. Power users will enjoy the keyboard shortcuts, conversations, and threaded direct messages.

Twibble Desktop: Twibble allows users to manage up to 3 different Twitter accounts, and includes keyboard shortcuts, location awareness, and viewing options.

Digsby: This desktop app is probably most recognizable for its multi-client IM support, but Digsby () (for Windows () only) can handle your social network profiles, and manage multiple Twitter accounts.

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Web

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Matt: Matt, which stands for Multi Account Twitter Tweeter, is a colorful and simple Twitter app that just lets you update multiple accounts from the Web.

TwittBot: TwittBot makes it possible to not only update multiple accounts, but allow multiple people to update the same account. The service looks for @replies to repost to specified Twitter accounts, and bots can be open to anyone or closed to a select group of individuals. This is a perfect tool for Twitter accounts that aggregate tweets from a variety of sources.

Tweet3: For web-based multiple account support that’s slightly different than the rest, there’s Tweet3. The site provides you with a dashboard view for each account, where you can customize the color, integrate with Facebook (), follow and unfollow Twitterers, and adjust settings. Should you tweet links, Tweet3 will track their performance in the analytics tab.

Splitweet: Designed around managing multiple Twitter accounts, Splitweet () is great for viewing a stream of tweets from all your accounts, posting tweets to multiple accounts, and following brand mentions. Positioned as tool for brands, Splitweet doesn’t really deliver on that promise, and companies would be better off with CoTweet, EasyTweet, or HootSuite.

TwitIQ: TwitIQ () is exactly like Twitter.com, except function-rich. So imagine your Twitter homepage including options to toggle through accounts, view a keyword tag cloud, and tab through conversations, questions, retweets, and URLs.

Twitomate: A very basic app designed just to let you queue tweets to publish on a rolling basis. But, if you’ve got multiple accounts and you just want to keep them fresh with regular updates, Twitomate is worth a look.

TweetLater: Another web service dedicated to automating the tweeting process, TweetLater includes support for unlimited Twitter accounts and bulk upload and scheduling of tweets. There are even some extra goodies thrown in for professional accounts.

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Semi-Professional

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CoTweet: CoTweet’s already the Twitter CRM Tool of Choice for BestBuy, JetBlue, and Ford, and that’s because it adds a business layer to Twitter account management. Yes, you can have multiple accounts, but the key with CoTweet is allowing multiple people to safely manage the same account so there’s no duplication of effort. We also love it for scheduling tweets for later, assigning tweets to coworkers, and adding notes to Twitter users.

EasyTweets: Positioned as a tool for marketers, EasyTweets is similar to a blogging platform, and comes with a minimum price tag of $24/mo if you choose to upgrade to get continuous searches, support for more than three accounts, post to multiple accounts, SMS alerts, and Google Analytics () data on links. EasyTweets has a few tweet viewing options, but TweetDeck () fans will especially like the Deck View (columns) of tweets.

HootSuite: A nifty web-based app for multiple accounts with multiple admins, HootSuite () is also great at giving you visibility into link stats right within their dashboard view of tweets (so long as you use their ow.ly URL shortener). It’s also a convenient app for Twitter search, scheduling tweets, and posting to Ping.fm to update more than just Twitter.

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Browser Add-Ons

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TwtterFox: TwitterFox () is a Firefox () extension from the same guys that are behind the TwitterFon () iPhone app. TwitterFox sits within the right hand corner of your browser and does a great job at keeping out of the way. Users can add multiple accounts in preferences and toggle through each of them in a single column view.

Adjix2TwitterLink: This bookmarklet is brought to you by URL shortening service, adjix. It’s simply for tweeting links while you browse, but since you have the option to specify which account to tweet from, and send later, it could prove extremely handy.

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iPhone

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Twitteriffic: The new and improved Twitteriffic 2.0 is a beauty and an extremely functional, free iPhone app that makes Twitter terrific on the iPhone and manages multiple accounts nicely. If tracking is your thing, you’ll love how Twitteriffic handles saved searches and supports advanced search queries.

Tweetie: The leader of the mobile pack, and the number 3 Twitter client overall according to TwitStat, Tweetie’s ($2.99) multiple account support is just one of the features that you’ll love about this iPhone app.

SimplyTweet: This full-featured iPhone app ($3.99) does the basics and then some. On top of managing multiple accounts, you can view trends, add notes, create saved views of friends (groups), use the Safari () bookmarklet, and look up contacts while composing your tweet.

TweetStack: TweetStack ($2.99) brings your TweetDeck columns to the iPhone, and unlike TweetDeck, supports multiple accounts. Pick TweetStack if you want a customizable tab bar, groups, search, and retweets.

LaTwit: A multi-account Twitter client ($2.99) for the iPhone that supports posting to Ping.fm, the option to hide users, custom font sizes, and interchangeable tabs.

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More Mobile

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Gravity: A native Twitter client for S60 devices (Nokia, Samsung, and LG phones), Gravity costs 10 bucks and works wonders for multiple accounts, Twitter Search, a tabbed view of your timeline, replies, messages, and friends, as well as groups, and multiple photo upload options.

Poketwit: This app is for Windows Mobile users and is perfect for multiple accounts, groups, conversations, retweets, tweet shortening, and having a Twitter address book.

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More Twitter Resources from Mashable

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- Tweets to Go: 35+ More Twitter Resources for Your Phone
- 26 Charities and Non-Profits on Twitter
- 40 of the Best Twitter Brands and the People Behind Them
- 10 Most Extraordinary Twitter Updates
- HOW TO: Use Twitter for Customer Service

We often get questions about if and when brands can edit a Wikipedia article and I’d like to provide some background on Wikipedia’s format and clarify what is and is not an acceptable edit. I am not morally against brands editing Wikipedia articles and there are no rules against it but the acceptable instances are few and any edits should be done transparently and by someone educated in the format and citation process of Wikipedia.

To start, let’s check off the two most frequent unacceptable reasons brands want to edit an article:

1.       There is a (correctly) cited and verified fact about your brand… that happens to be negative or not officially acknowledged. If information about your brand is backed up by what the Wikipedia community considers a reliable and verified source it stays. There are clear guidelines on reliable sources here. If there are un-verified and un-reliable facts you may have a case of vandalism- this is covered below.

2.       You want Wikipedia to sound like your website. Wikipedia articles are a collection of cited facts and common-use definitions so it will understandably differ from the About page of your website. The length of articles varies based on the amount of public and verified facts and information about the subject. Also, the idea that a brand is “the foremost leader in” or has “the latest and greatest” is opinion not fact. Any of these “peacock terms” will quickly get you flagged by administrators, read more here.

Now let’s review the acceptable reasons to edit a Wikipedia article. I welcome other examples or opinions below in the comments section.

When editing is acceptable:

Vandalism. Vandalism is any addition, removal, or change of content made in a deliberate attempt to compromise the integrity of Wikipedia. This includes obscenities or crude humor, page blanking, and the insertion of nonsense into articles. If you see vandalism on your page, report it to Wikipedia here.

New information. Maybe you see legitimately important information lacking from an article or you have updated research on your product just released. This new information should be added just like any other Wikipedia edit, keeping in mind that sources for this information must be reliable and verified and that they pass the gut check. Get smart on the Wikipedia community first, starting with reviewing their Five Pillars.

No article at all. If there is no Wikipedia article about your brand and you wish to create one you can do so if you have some reliable and verified information to include. Follow this guide on creating your first article and keep it as short as it needs to be. It might be that the only thing verified about your brand is the name and the date it was founded, if so than that is the only information you should add to the article.

If you’re editing Wikipedia at work your IP address can be traced by to you as the editor; you should be comfortable with total transparency of edits- if you aren’t that’s a bad sign. There are plenty of examples of brands editing for the wrong reason and even political figures getting dinged for minor edits so think about how customers and Wikipedia community would feel about the edits and tread lightly.

Update: Thanks to Wikipedia editor Themfromspace for mentioning the Conflict of Interest Guidelines which any editor should read. Always take steps to be transparent and avoid COI, if you are unsure about when and how to edit an article consider the Request Comment or Request Edit options instead of jumping into the process.

Rest assured that there are trained administrators out there making sure that people respect the community and who are quick to respond when truly false or dangerous information is posted. If you’d like to keep an eye on your brand’s Wikipedia article (not recommended for those with an itchy trigger finger) you sign up for email alerts from Wiki Alarm or find a listening vendor who monitors any mention of your brand across articles (Alterian’s SM2 is an example).

For information and helpful links about all of Wikipedia’s history and policies, start with the Five Pillars of Wikipedia and take any questions to the Wikipedia Community Portal.

Written by Marshall Kirkpatrick / January 9, 2010 9:25 PM / 113 Comments

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg told a live audience yesterday that if he were to create Facebook again today, user information would by default be public, not private as it was for years until the company changed dramatically in December.

In a six-minute interview on stage with TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington, Zuckerberg spent 60 seconds talking about Facebook's privacy policies. His statements were of major importance for the world's largest social network - and his arguments in favor of an about-face on privacy deserve close scrutiny.

Zuckerberg offered roughly 8 sentences in response to Arrington's question about where privacy was going on Facebook and around the web. The question was referencing the changes Facebook underwent last month. Your name, profile picture, gender, current city, networks, Friends List, and all the pages you subscribe to are now publicly available information on Facebook. This means everyone on the web can see it; it is searchable. I'll post Zuckerberg's sentences on their own first, then follow up with the questions they raise in my mind. You can also watch the video below, the privacy part we transcribe is from 3:00 to 4:00.

Zuckerberg:

"When I got started in my dorm room at Harvard, the question a lot of people asked was 'why would I want to put any information on the Internet at all? Why would I want to have a website?'

"And then in the last 5 or 6 years, blogging has taken off in a huge way and all these different services that have people sharing all this information. People have really gotten comfortable not only sharing more information and different kinds, but more openly and with more people. That social norm is just something that has evolved over time.

"We view it as our role in the system to constantly be innovating and be updating what our system is to reflect what the current social norms are.

"A lot of companies would be trapped by the conventions and their legacies of what they've built, doing a privacy change - doing a privacy change for 350 million users is not the kind of thing that a lot of companies would do. But we viewed that as a really important thing, to always keep a beginner's mind and what would we do if we were starting the company now and we decided that these would be the social norms now and we just went for it."

That's Not a Believable Explanation

This is a radical change from the way that Zuckerberg pounded on the importance of user privacy for years. That your information would only be visible to the people you accept as friends was fundamental to the DNA of the social network that hundreds of millions of people have joined over these past few years. Privacy control, he told me less than 2 years ago, is "the vector around which Facebook operates."

I don't buy Zuckerberg's argument that Facebook is now only reflecting the changes that society is undergoing. I think Facebook itself is a major agent of social change and by acting otherwise Zuckerberg is being arrogant and condescending.

Perhaps the new privacy controls will prove sufficient. Perhaps Facebook's pushing our culture away from privacy will end up being a good thing. The way the company is going about it makes me very uncomfortable, though, and some of the changes are clearly bad. It is clearly bad to no longer allow people to keep the pages they subscribe to private on Facebook.

This major reversal, backed-up by superficial explanations, makes me wonder if Facebook's changing philosophies about privacy are just convenient stories to tell while the company shifts its strategy to exert control over the future of the web.

Facebook's Different Stories

First the company kept user data siloed inside its site alone, saying that a high degree of user privacy would make users comfortable enough to share more information with a smaller number of trusted people.

Now that it has 350 million people signed up and connected to their friends and family in a way they never have been before - now Facebook decides that the initial, privacy-centric, contract with users is out of date. That users actually want to share openly, with the world at large, and incidentally (as Facebook's Director of Public Policy Barry Schnitt told us in December) that it's time for increased pageviews and advertising revenue, too.

The Flimsy Evidence

What makes Facebook think the world is becoming more public and less private? Zuckerberg cites the rise of blogging "and all these different services that have people sharing all this information." That last part must mean Twitter, right? But blogging is tiny compared to Facebook! It's made a big impact on the world, but only because it perhaps doubled or tripled the small percentage of people online who publish long-form text content. Not very many people write blogs, almost everyone is on Facebook.

Facebook's Barry Schnitt told us last month that he too believes the world is becoming more open and his evidence is Twitter, MySpace, comments posted to newspaper websites and the rise of Reality TV.

But Facebook is bigger and is growing much faster than all of those other things. Do they really expect us to believe that the popularity of reality TV is evidence that users want their Facebook friends lists and fan pages made permanently public? Why cite those kinds phenomena as evidence that the red hot social network needs to change its ways?

The company's justifications of the claim that they are reflecting broader social trends just aren't credible. A much more believable explanation is that Facebook wants user information to be made public and so they "just went for it," to use Zuckerberg's words from yesterday.

(Why didn't Arrington press Zuckerberg on stage about this? The rise of blogging is evidence that Facebook needs to change its fundamental stance on privacy?)

This is Very Important

Facebook allows everyday people to share the minutiae of their daily lives with trusted friends and family, to easily distribute photos and videos - if you use it regularly you know how it has made a very real impact on families and social groups that used to communicate very infrequently. Accessible social networking technology changes communication between people in a way similar to if not as intensely as the introduction of the telephone and the printing press. It changes the fabric of peoples' lives together. 350 million people signed up for Facebook under the belief their information could be shared just between trusted friends. Now the company says that's old news, that people are changing. I don't believe it.

I think Facebook is just saying that because that's what it wants to be true.

Whether less privacy is good or bad is another matter, the change of the contract with users based on feigned concern for users' desires is offensive and makes any further moves by Facebook suspect.

See also: Facebook's privacy vs. real-world privacy: two different things.

You don’t have to look far to find social media roundup posts this time of year. But what about the most effective one-two marketing punch for building community AND delivering conversions and ROI?  Social Media and Search Engine Optimization – or “Social SEO” as we like to call it.

Out of the 300 or so posts published in 2009, I’ve picked the best of the year based on a mix of my own opinion and metrics such as comments, inbound links, pageviews and social engagement off the blog through social news, bookmarking, Twitter and similar services using PostRank.

Here are TopRank’s Top 10 Social SEO Posts of 2009. Enjoy!

#1. 25 Must Read Social Media Marketing Tips – After interviewing some of the top social media and marketing experts in the industry (Charlene Li, Chris Brogan, Brian Solis, Scott Monty and many others) I decided to take the best questions and answers from each interview and aggregate them into one post. The result is a 360 degree view of how to plan, approach and measure social media.
(40 Comments, 1,617 Tweets, 896 Links, 38,528 Pageviews, PostRank 8.3)

#2. Best and Worst Practices Social Media Marketing – Knowing that social media is increasingly intertwined with search engine optimization, this post compares the dramatic increase in interest in the social side of marketing and offers a mix of best practices and worst practices for readers in need of some social media demystification.
(Comments: 54, Tweets: 379,  Links: 2,624, Pageviews: 20,810, PostRank: 5.0)

#3. 16 Rules For Social Media Optimization Revisited – Three years ago, Rohit Bhargava coined the phrase, “social media optimization” and wrote a post with 5 rules for SMO. I joined 3 other bloggers to expand that list to 16. Fast forward to 2009 and Adam Singer from TopRank revisted those original 16 rules to see which were valid and which were outdated. You may be surprised at the result.
(Comments: 16, Tweets: 486, Links: 249, Pageviews: 8,059, PostRank: 8.8)

#4. Social Media Marketing Tops Digital Marketing Tactics for 2009 – One of the useful applications of growing a blog community is the opportunity to tap into their opinions and provide insight into industry trends. This poll revealed that 6 of the top digital marketing tactics readers would emphasize were social media. SEO ranked number 3.
(Comments: 32, Tweets: 227, Links: 310, Pageviews: 10,867, PostRank: 5.0)

#5. Social Media and SEO: 5 Essential Steps to Success (Published on Mashable) – The intersection of search engine optimization and social media is often one sided. Social media practitioners see the relationship and community building benefits while many SEOs focus on promotion and link building benefits. This guest post on Mashable offers specific tips and examples of how to incorporate the best of both worlds: Social SEO.
(Comments: 56, Tweets: 784, Links: 1,094, Pageviews: , PostRank: 6.2)

#6. 50 Ways to FAIL On Twitter – This is pure and simple, linkbait. We fall more on the optimistic side of our editorial and content strategy, but I crowdsourced what NOT to do on Twitter via @leeodden and received some very strong opinions. Read this post as an optimist and reverse the tips and you have 50 things your SHOULD do to be more successful using Twitter.
(Comments: 53, Tweets: 698, Links: 381, Pageviews: 9,233, PostRank: 10.0)

#7. 10 Proven Applications For Social Media – With millions of self professed “social media experts” regurgitating a handful of original ideas, a vacuum exists for practical examples of what social media can mean to advance business goals. TopRank’s Adam Singer delivers in this post that includes end benefits ranging from PR to SEO to, well, I’ll let you read the post to find out.
(Comments: 22, Tweets: 839, Links: 214, Pageviews: 11,664, PostRank: 8.2)

#8. 5 Near Free Social Media Monitoring Tools – Effective social media and social SEO efforts begin and end (actually there is no “end” in social but you get the idea) with social media monitoring. Such tools can be difficult for marketing dollars strapped organizations to justify, so TopRank’ Michelle Bowles delivered with this review of 5 free and low cost tools. The stats on this post are amazing considering it ranks top ten for the year and was just published 2 weeks ago!
(Comments: 37, Tweets: 633, Links: 431, Pageviews: 4,246, PostRank: 9.1)

#9. 6 Social Search Engines to Start 2009 - What better way to start 2009 than to compare the top social search engines? At the time, there was no “real time search” or deals between Google and Bing with Twitter or Facebook. Several of the social media search engines reviewed in this post have expanded a great deal and some have withered away into notgoingtohappen land.
(Comments: 38, Tweets: 27, Links: 677, Pageviews: 14,563, PostRank: 8.9)

#10. Social Media Marketing Basics: Facebook & Blog Promotion – “Build it and they will come” doesn’t work with SEO and it certainly isn’t effective with marketing on the social web. Research, planning strategy and building a social presence is important. But without content distribution channels and promotion, it can take a very long time to build a community or reach an effective level of momentum. This post gives specific advice for two of the most popular social applications in use.
(Comments 33, Tweets: 199, Links: 137, Pageviews: 4,680, PostRank: 8.5)

What were your favorite Social SEO blog posts in 2009? What social web and search engine optimization topics would you like to see more of in 2010?

View all our posts about SEO or Social Media here.

Five years to the month after it was founded, cross-blog social networking widget MyBlogLog will be closed down by Yahoo! in January, we're hearing from sources close to the project. MyBlogLog is a service that shows blog writers and readers the faces and profile information of other MyBlogLog users that visit their sites.

MyBlogLog was a wildly innovative service that grew fast after launching and was acquired in January 2007 by Yahoo! for $10 million. It made a deal with users: Give us your personal information and we'll show you the faces of people who read your blog. That was a compelling offer and the resulting data amassed could have proven invaluable, had Yahoo! chosen to cultivate it and a developer ecosystem around it. That potential was so great, in fact, that sunset for MyBlogLog is downright tragic. It's also likely to anger bloggers all around the web.

In addition to showing the faces of recent blog visitors, MyBlogLog also offered programatic access to activity streams from social networks that users associated with their MyBlogLog accounts. For example, Yahoo's Kent Brewster, now at Netflix, built a bookmarklet that would display the recent bookmarks on Delicious, photos on Flickr and job titles from LinkedIn of the latest MyBlogLog users to visit any given blog.

Yahoo! has let the service atrophy for years and will now put it to rest. To think that this service offered publishers and developers access to personal, demographic, taste and activity data of a website's readers - and yet that offering has in the end gone no where - that's downright crazy.

Here at ReadWriteWeb we scraped a feed from our MyBlogLog page of the new users just added to our community, then reached out to thank them for their support and welcome them personally. That was just the beginning of what could have been a very valuable source of data. Imagine getting a feed of the LinkedIn job titles of all your recent readers and presenting that to a blog's advertisers. Both analytically and financially, there was so much potential in MyBlogLog. See our 2008 post The Significance of the MyBlogLog API if you're a social web geek and want to have your heart broken.

Looking at the ecosystems beginning to form around Twitter, Facebook and other user data - MyBlogLog may just have been ahead of its time. The service isn't alone among potentially world-changing technologies acquired and then starved of support at Yahoo! We've asked Yahoo! for comment and will update this post if we receive any.

Image via CrunchBase

We called co-founder Eric Marcoulier for comment and he offered the following perspective: "So much of your company's long term sucess when it's acquired is based on the amount of executive juice it has. The only way it survives and flourishes is if you have an executive champion who promotes it internally. Shortly after we were acquired we were transfered away from our champion and under someone who didn't feel the same way about MyBlogLog. In those circumstances, things simply slow down.

"For any startup that has earn outs, and this didn't affect us, you've got to keep in mind that in 3 months you could be reorganized and the new guy could shut you down. The picture that gets painted early on when you have your product champions can change in a heartbeat and it's important for entreprenuers to consider that when looking at the deal terms."

R.I.P. MyBlogLog.

If you need further evidence that social media is here to stay in the corporate world, look no further than Telstra, the Australian telecom giant.

The 40,000+ person company makes social media training mandatory for its employees and formalized a policy of “3Rs” – responsibility, respect and representation. Taking things a step further, today the company is trying something about as transparent as it gets – publishing their entire social media training guide online, so that anyone can check it out, learn and critique.

We got a chance to take a look at the guide, which takes the form of a comic book but also includes narration from a speaker (in a cool Australian accent too). It starts with the very basics – like “what is Facebook ()?” – but eventually moves into much more complex issues like “what if my [personal] blog post is critical of Telstra?” To-date, the company says that 12,000 of its employees have completed the course. Here’s a quick introduction:

Speaking of the decision to publish it on the Web, Telstra says that “while this communications environment has risks for corporate entities and individuals alike, we believe that with the right training and policy support the potential benefits far outweigh the risks … We have decided to open up this course to the scrutiny and feedback of the ‘outside world’ as it may assist other organisations and help raise the level of awareness about social media with staff.”

Clearly, it’s a bold move by Telstra that will leave them open to plenty of criticism, but ultimately we think it’s a smart one that should foster a lot of conversation in the space. The tool itself is also very well put together and highly interactive – give it a whirl and let us know what stands out to you in the comments.

Five months after it first announced coming privacy changes this past summer, Facebook is finally rolling out a new set of revamped privacy settings for its 350 million users. The social networking site has rightly been criticized for its confusing privacy settings, most notably in a must-read report by the Canadian Privacy Commissioner issued in July and most recently by a Norwegian consumer protection agency. We're glad to see Facebook is attempting to respond to those privacy criticisms with these changes, which are going live this evening. Unfortunately, several of the claimed privacy "improvements" have created new and serious privacy problems for users of the popular social network service.

The new changes are intended to simplify Facebook's notoriously complex privacy settings and, in the words of today's privacy announcement to all Facebook users, "give you more control of your information." But do all of the changes really give Facebook users more control over their information? EFF took a close look at the changes to figure out which ones are for the better — and which ones are for the worse.

Our conclusion? These new "privacy" changes are clearly intended to push Facebook users to publicly share even more information than before. Even worse, the changes will actually reduce the amount of control that users have over some of their personal data.

Not to say that many of the changes aren't good for privacy. But other changes are bad, while a few are just plain ugly.

The Good: Simpler Privacy Settings and Per-Post Privacy Options

The new changes have definitely simplified Facebook's privacy settings, reducing the overall number of settings while making them clearer and easier for users to find and understand. The simplification of Facebook's privacy settings includes the elimination of regional networks, which sometimes would lead people to unwittingly share their Facebook profile with an entire city, or, as Facebook's founder Mark Zuckerberg explained in a recent open letter, an entire country.

Perhaps most importantly, Facebook has added a feature that we and many others have long advocated for: the ability to define the privacy of your Facebook content on a per-post basis. So, for example, if you only want your close friends to see a particular photo, or only your business colleagues to see a particular status update, you can do that — using a simple drop-down menu that lets you define who will see that piece of content.

Most important, however, is the simple fact that as part of this transition, Facebook is forcing all of its users to actually pay attention to the specifics of their privacy settings. Considering that many if not most users have previously simply adopted the defaults offered by Facebook rather than customizing their privacy settings, this is an especially good thing.

No question, these are positive developments that hopefully will lead more people to carefully review and customize their level of privacy on Facebook. Unfortunately, the new flexibility offered by per-post privacy settings, a definite "good," is being used to justify the "bad"...

The Bad: EFF Doesn't Recommend Facebook's "Recommended" Privacy Settings

Although sold as a "privacy" revamp, Facebook's new changes are obviously intended to get people to open up even more of their Facebook data to the public. The privacy "transition tool" that guides users through the configuration will "recommend" — preselect by default — the setting to share the content they post to Facebook, such as status messages and wall posts, with everyone on the Internet, even though the default privacy level that those users had accepted previously was limited to "Your Networks and Friends" on Facebook (for more details, we highly recommend the Facebook privacy resource page and blog post from our friends at the ACLU, carefully comparing the old settings to the new settings). As the folks at TechCrunch explained last week before the changes debuted:

The way Facebook makes its recommendations will have a huge impact on the site's future. Right now, most people don't share their content using the 'everyone' option that Facebook introduced last summer. If Facebook pushes users to start using that, it could have a better stream of content to go against Twitter in the real-time search race. But Facebook has something to lose by promoting ‘everyone' updates: given the long-standing private nature of Facebook, they could lead to a massive privacy fiasco as users inadvertently share more than they mean to.

At this point there's no "if" about it: the Facebook privacy transition tool is clearly designed to push users to share much more of their Facebook info with everyone, a worrisome development that will likely cause a major shift in privacy level for most of Facebook's users, whether intentionally or inadvertently. As Valleywag rightly warns in its story "Facebook's New ‘Privacy' Scheme Smells Like an Anti-Privacy Plot":

[S]miley-face posturing aside, users should never forget that Facebook remains, at heart, not a community but a Silicon Valley startup, always hungry for exponential growth and new revenue streams. So be sure to review those new privacy "options," and take Facebook's recommendations with a huge grain of salt.

Being a free speech organization, EFF is supportive of internet users who consciously choose to share more on Facebook after weighing the privacy risks; more online speech is a good thing. But to ensure that users don't accidentally share more than they intend to, we do not recommend Facebook's "recommended" settings. Facebook will justify the new push for more sharing with everyone by pointing to the new per-post privacy options — if you don't want to share a particular piece of content with everyone, Facebook will argue, then just set the privacy level for that piece of content to something else. But we think the much safer option is to do the reverse: set your general privacy default to a more restrictive level, like "Only Friends," and then set the per-post privacy to "Everyone" for those particular things that you're sure you want to share with the world.

The Ugly: Information That You Used to Control Is Now Treated as "Publicly Available," and You Can't Opt Out of The "Sharing" of Your Information with Facebook Apps

Looking even closer at the new Facebook privacy changes, things get downright ugly when it comes to controlling who gets to see personal information such as your list of friends. Under the new regime, Facebook treats that information — along with your name, profile picture, current city, gender, networks, and the pages that you are a "fan" of — as "publicly available information" or "PAI." Before, users were allowed to restrict access to much of that information. Now, however, those privacy options have been eliminated. For example, although you used to have the ability to prevent everyone but your friends from seeing your friends list, that old privacy setting — shown below — has now been removed completely from the privacy settings page.

Facebook counters that some of this "publicly available information" was previously available to the public to some degree (while admitting that some of it definitely was not, such as your gender and your current city, which you used to be able to hide). For example, Facebook points to the fact that although you could restrict who could see what pages you are a fan of when they look at your profile, your fan status was still reflected on the page that you were a fan of. But that's no justification for eliminating your control over what people see on your profile. For example, you might want to join the fan page of a controversial issue (like a page that supports or condemns the legalization of gay marriage), and let all your personal friends see this on your profile, but hide it from your officemates, relatives or the public at large. While it's true that someone could potentially look through all the thousands upon thousands of possible fan pages to find out which ones you've joined, few people would actually do this.

Facebook also counters that users can still control whether non-friends can see your Friends List by going into the hard-to-find profile editing settings on your profile page and changing the number of friends displayed on the public version of your profile to "0" unchecking the new check-box in your Friends setting that says "show my friends on my profile". However, if the goal with these changes was to clarify the privacy settings and make them easier to find and use, then Facebook has completely failed when it comes to controlling who sees who you are friends with. And even if you do have some control over whether non-friends can see your friends list — if you hunt around and can find the right setting, which is no longer under "Privacy Settings" — Facebook has made the privacy situation even worse when it comes to information sharing with the developers of Facebook apps.

The issue of privacy when it comes to Facebook apps such as those innocent-seeming quizzes has been well-publicized by our friends at the ACLU and was a major concern for the Canadian Privacy Commissioner, which concluded that app developers had far too much freedom to suck up users' personal data, including the data of Facebook users who don't use apps at all. Facebook previously offered a solution to users who didn't want their info being shared with app developers over the Facebook Platform every time a one of their friends added an app: users could select a privacy option telling Facebook to "not share any information about me through the Facebook API."

That option has disappeared, and now apps can get all of your "publicly available information" whenever a friend of yours adds an app.

Facebook defends this change by arguing that very few users actually ever selected that option — in the same breath that they talk about how complicated and hard to find the previous privacy settings were. Rather than eliminating the option, Facebook should have made it more prominent and done a better job of publicizing it. Instead, the company has sent a clear message: if you don't want to share your personal data with hundreds or even thousands of nameless, faceless Facebook app developers — some of whom are obviously far from honest — then you shouldn't use Facebook.

These changes are especially worrisome because even something as seemingly innocuous as your list of friends can reveal a great deal about you. In September, for example, an MIT study nicknamed "Gaydar" demonstrated that researchers could accurately predict a Facebook user's sexual orientation simply by examining the user's friends-list. This kind of data mining of social networks is a science still in its infancy; the amount of data that can be extrapolated from "publicly available information" will only increase with time. In addition to potentially revealing intimate facts about your sexuality — or your politics, or your religion — this change also greatly reduces Facebook's utility as a tool for political dissent. In the Iranian protests earlier this year, Facebook played a critical role in allowing dissidents to communicate and organize with relative privacy in the face of a severe government crackdown. Much of that utility and privacy has now been lost.

The creation of this new category of "publicly available information" is made all the more ugly by Facebook's failure to properly disclose it until today — the very day it is forcing the new change on users — when it added a new bullet point at the top of its privacy policy specifying this new category of public information that will not have any privacy settings. The previous versions of the policy, however, either didn't disclose this fact at all, or buried it deep in the text surrounded by broad assurances of privacy.

For example, in its previous privacy policy before it was revised in November, Facebook didn't specify any of your data as "publicly available information," and instead offered broad privacy assurances like this one:

We understand you may not want everyone in the world to have the information you share on Facebook; that is why we give you control of your information. ... You choose what information you put in your profile, including contact and personal information, pictures, interests and groups you join. And you control the users with whom you share that information through the privacy settings on the Privacy page.

Meanwhile, the privacy policy as updated in November did specifically call out certain information as "publicly available" and without privacy settings nearly half-way down the page, surrounded by privacy promises such as these:

• "You decide how much information you feel comfortable sharing on Facebook and you control how it is distributed through your privacy settings."
• "Facebook is about sharing information with others — friends and people in your networks — while providing you with privacy settings that you can use to restrict other users from accessing your information."
• "you can control who has access to [certain information you have posted to your profile], as well as who can find you in searches, through your privacy settings."
• "You can use your privacy settings to limit which of your information is available to 'everyone.'"

These statements are at best confusing and at worst simply untrue, and didn't give sufficient notice to users of the changes that were announced today.

In conclusion, we at EFF are worried that today's changes will lead to Facebook users publishing to the world much more information about themselves than they ever intended. Back in 2008, Facebook told Canada's Privacy Commissioner that "users are given extensive and precise controls that allow them to choose who sees what among their networks and friends, as well as tools that give them the choice to make a limited set of information available to search engines and other outside entities." In its report from July, The Privacy Commissioner relied on such statements to conclude that Facebook's default settings fell within "reasonable expectations," specifically noting that the "privacy settings — and notably all those relating to profile fields — indicate information sharing with 'My Networks and Friends.'"

No longer. Major privacy settings are now set to share with everyone by default, in some cases without any user choice, and we at EFF do not think that those new defaults fall within the average Facebook user's "reasonable expectations". If you're a Facebook user and you agree, we urge you to visit the Facebook Site Governance page and leave a comment telling Facebook that you want real control over all of your data. In the meantime, those users who care about control over their privacy will have to decide for themselves whether participation in the new Facebook is worth such an extreme privacy trade-off.