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Visualizing the Evolution of Privacy on Facebook

Recently, Facebook announced a whole new slate of changes to their service that had broad implications for their users in terms of privacy settings and how much control people had over what information the social network shared with third party services through its API. Originally a true ‘walled garden’ Facebook kept almost everything to themselves, but over the past few years they’ve gradually been opening more and more of their data to outside services, tweaking the default privacy settings along the way.

Click through any of the thumbnails to view full infographic

To try and help illustrate how Facebook’s default privacy settings has evolved over the past few years, Matt McKeon, a developer with the Visual Communication Lab at IBM Research’s Center for Social Software has created an infographic series to try and help explain it:

… Facebook hasn’t always managed its users’ data well. In the beginning, it restricted the visibility of a user’s personal information to just their friends and their “network” (college or school). Over the past couple of years, the default privacy settings for a Facebook user’s personal information have become more and more permissive. They’ve also changed how your personal information is classified several times, sometimes in a manner that has been confusing for their users. This has largely been part of Facebook’s effort to correlate, publish, and monetize their social graph: a massive database of entities and links that covers everything from where you live to the movies you like and the people you trust.

This blog post by Kurt Opsahl at the the EFF gives a brief timeline of Facebook’s Terms of Service changes through April of 2010. It’s a great overview, but I was a little disappointed it wasn’t an actual timeline: hence my initial inspiration for this infographic.

To see the full, animated infographic you can visit Matt’s post on it here.

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