Hacked off: Why Facebook should put its trusted contacts feature back in the box
As our social profiles become increasingly entangled with our real-world identities, we need to change the way we think about online spaces, writes Annie Macfarlane.
Facebook is sending a 'problematic mixed message' about passwords
For a service at the top of its game, Facebook has something of a reputation for pushing semi-fledged ideas out of the nest without a great deal of planning.
Taking a confident approach to change has its advantages: it cuts red tape, rewards creativity and gets ideas out the door to see how they fly in the real world. On the other hand, it can result in users struggling with half-baked features, with any underlying sense of structure falling by the wayside.
Facebook’s myriad privacy settings illustrate this perfectly. It’s notoriously hard to keep up, and for most of us, the new Trusted Contacts feature won’t even have registered on our radar. So in case you missed it, here’s how it works: you can now assign three or more friends to help recover your account if you’re ever locked out and can’t reset your password in the normal way (email, security questions). In such a scenario, each of your trusted contacts will request a special access code, which, when combined with the others, clicks open the lock on your Facebook account.
Says Facebook: “With trusted contacts, there’s no need to worry about remembering the answer to your security question or filling out long web forms to prove who you are. You can recover your account with help from your friends."
Appropriate contacts should be “people you trust, like friends you’d give a spare key to your house”.
The problem with this is that we don’t see the sanctity of our homes and our online properties in at all the same way. Most of us accept that if we leave ourselves logged in to Facebook at a friend’s house or – heaven forbid – a public computer, we are open to attack which can range from the mildly humorous to the deliberately destructive. I’d like to think I have friends I can trust, but I see enough sabotage in my news feed to maintain a little caution.
In most cases, it’s a light-hearted prank, intended to be only a little embarrassing. But with our social media lives increasingly under scrutiny by employers and others, there is an uncomfortable margin for error. If this feels overly dramatic, think of the recent case of the young woman who was publicly shamed following some distasteful but throwaway posts sent from her Twitter account years before. If you’re the administrator of a business page, the consequences of an ill-judged status update sent by an inebriated friend could be greater still.
The situation is more complex still for the next generation. According to research from Pew, one in three teenagers voluntarily share their social networking passwords with friends or significant others. Anecdotally, many see it as a social currency, a special mark of trust and even a way to feel less alone in the drama-filled world of online interactions. Of course, this can go wrong in any number of ways: a former friend shares pictures intended to be private; a bullying message is falsely attributed to a classmate; a controlling partner gets hold of the toolkit needed to keep a girlfriend or boyfriend in line. The results of this are real and quantifiable: young people are leaving Facebook behind, while others are resorting to the ‘super logoff’, deactivating their account every time they go offline.
For children and adults alike, the message that sharing passwords is not only not a big deal, but is now actually a recommended feature, sends a problematic mixed message. Until we are culturally better able to better appreciate these boundaries, I think Facebook would do well to quietly put this new setting back in the box.
Annie Macfarlane is head of community management at Yomego