Facebook Privacy: An unusable maze...

All the kerfuffle about the complex and confusing privacy settings on Facebook showed just how badly the situation needed an infographic, so the New York Times stepped up to the plate. This article and image map out the nooks and crannies of all the settings you can tweak - or could tweak, if you could find them. Hiding different settings in different places is worse than unusable design - it strongly hints of intentional obfuscation. The same article shows how Facebook's privacy policy has grown in word-count over the years, and that it's now actually longer than the United States Constitution. As I mentioned recently, long instructions indicate poor design - and if your website takes more words to define than a whole country, you've officially gone overboard!
[via Lifehacker]

2 comments:

Unknown said...

See the one at top right, that says "Facebook Ads Page" and it has 2 settings I need to control? Well even with the NYT's kind instructions I can't find the bloody thing. Does anybody know where this is?

Josh Shields said...

So there are two places where you can find privacy settings: privacy, and ads.

What a horribly misleading diagram.