The website OnGoodAuthority is featuring a new CE course called Facebook and Google and Twitter…Oh My! Ethical Issues for Clinicians.

I’m pleased to be one of the contributors to this course.

This 3 unit CE course presents four audio interviews by Barbara Alexander, LCSW, BCD with the following speakers:

• Curt Kearney, MA, LCPC – “My Patient Wants to ‘Friend’ Me”
• Keely Kolmes, Psy.D.  – “A Social Media Policy for Your Practice”
• Lisa Johnson, Ph.D. – “Social Media Enhances Clinical Work”
• Frederick Reamer, Ph.D. – “Standards for Using the Internet and Social Media”

There is currently a pre-order special: $35 until January 15, 2011.

After that, the price will go up to $55.

Currently, you must order this by phone: 800-835-9636.

For those who do not wish to take the CE but who still want to listen to the interview, I will upload my segment here in the near future.

Listen to a brief clip of this interview:

Therapist-Client Interactions on the Internet

Thank you to everyone who participated in our survey. The summary of the results of the research Dan Taube, J.D., Ph.D. and I conducted on psychotherapists who have had intentional and accidental extra-therapeutic encounters with their clients on the Internet are posted on my research page. A larger slideshow can be viewed here.

To read a brief lit review and description of the research, please see our article Clinical implications of therapist-client interactions on the Internet: Boundary considerations in cyberspace.

Facebook has released a new Location feature that already has critics — including the ACLU — worried about privacy concerns. As someone with a Facebook account, I found myself once again wondering why it was that I was hearing of new features on Facebook from news sources, rather than being notified of them when logging into my account. If you care about your privacy or you work with co-workers or clinical populations who have privacy worries, you may want to be aware of the new information that may be shared.

Those who want control over Locations should take the following steps.

1. Log into your Facebook account and in the upper right hand corner where it shows Account, click on that and drag down to Privacy Settings.

2. Here you will see what you are sharing on Facebook. Check to see what is selected for Places I Check In which may be set up as “Everyone,” Friends of Friends,” or “Friends Only.”

(Clicking on all images will let you view them in large size.)

3. If you want to modify the setting, click on Customize Settings at the bottom.

4. This will bring you to the following screen.

5. If you want the greatest level of privacy, you would make sure three things are selected here:

First, make sure “Only Me” is selected for “Places I Check In.”

Second, Disable “Include me in People Here Now” after I check in. Enabling this will allow others to see if you are at the venue (feel free to click the “See an example” link on Facebook to see what this will look like to anyone else checking in).

Third, at the bottom, make sure “Friends can check me into Places” is Disabled.

You can read more about the new feature and the concerns of others on mashable and also on Violet Blue’s blog in which she publicized the potential problem raised by @RodBegbie about what happens when someone adds your home address as a venue on Facebook. It sounds as though users will have to go through a tedious process of flagging a venue and then waiting for Facebook to respond in order to get their personal information removed.

Facebook released news of some big privacy changes this week. As always, changes that affect our privacy settings are important to  fully understand. The biggest changes allow third-party websites to access and store information about individual users. You can find out more information here along with some instructions on how to restrict information. Just to be clear, if you’re someone who uses a number of Apps that connect outside services to Facebook and if you’re hitting the Like button on sites and connecting that to your Facebook profile, this will affect your privacy. There are also further instructions on how to protect yourself from Facebook’s F8 platform, with the caveat “as best you can.”

Another change that will affect everyone is the change to Pages. On people’s profiles, the Pages section will now be folded into Interests and users will be asked to convert Pages into Interests.

To quote from the CNN article linked to above:

So what happens when you are asked to convert your Pages into Interests? Let’s take a look.

When I logged into my Facebook account last night, I was informed that they had “improved” the profile so that it links to Pages, and I was offered the opportunity to convert my Pages. I wasn’t given a No option. Simply Link All to My Profile or Ask Me Later.

You can click on all images below to view larger versions.

You’ll note that in the image, there is small print saying, Learn more. When I clicked on Learn More here is what I learned: I learned that this was a really great thing that was going to enhance my Facebook experience and make my life an overall happier place.

There was no clear or accessible information to learn more about a decision NOT to convert Pages or how to not have them show up or even how it might compromise my privacy to just go ahead and Convert All as I was being encouraged to do.

In order to remove the Pages, I had to go at it sideways. I went back to my profile and selected Edit Information when viewing my profile.

Here is where I was able to select or deselect the Pages and confirm whether I did, in fact, want them on my profile.

Since the privacy updates will now make you connected to others via a number of your interests, I unchecked the boxes next to these Pages, and was subsequently warned that this would create blank spots on my profile. Okay with me.

Back on my main profile page, I was given a message to explain why some of my information had disappeared.

It is disturbing that never once in the process was I given any information about how the changes would affect my privacy. There was no link to a privacy policy or statement about what this step would do. There was just subtle pressure to go ahead and make the changes and warnings that I was going to make myself a Facebook pariah by not having certain information on my profile.

So where is this information to be found?

If you click on Help Center under your account on the right side of the screen, you will be taken to the Help pages.

In the Help Center, on the far right, there is a statement about New Profile Connections and a link to where you can Learn more about the new Community Pages and profile connections.

When you click on that link to learn more, here is where all the information I should have received upon login was hiding:

And of course, you can click on each topic to expand it, and there is the information about how this will affect the content on your profile.

Lots of people use Facebook. But not everyone is tech-savvy. There are moms and dads on Facebook, young people who are not tech-smart, teachers, doctors, and just plain old people who care about their privacy now and then. Even folks who are tech-savvy shouldn’t have to hunt around for updated privacy information.

So come on, Facebook. When you make changes that influence privacy, the very first pop-up we see when we sign into your site shouldn’t be a link asking us to Convert our Pages to Interests. It should be a link to how the action you’re asking us to respond to right now is going to affect our privacy.

Some further changes to Facebook?

There’s a Wall posting that’s been forwarded by folks saying:

FACEBOOK is at it again…violating your personal information: As of today, there is a new privacy setting called “Instant Personalization” that shares data with non-facebook websites and it is automatically set to “Allow.” Go to Account > Privacy Settings > Applications and Websites and uncheck “Allow,” then confirm that you’re opting out. Please repost.

I followed this path, and sure enough, here is what I saw:

When I clicked on “Allow” to deselect it, here’s the message I saw:

More information about how I may be depriving myself of a “richer” Facebook experience and the disclaimer that even opting out will not prevent my friends from sharing this information with others. Again, how come I had to be notified about this by my friends, Facebook, and not the service itself? Shady.

If you’re a mental health professional trying to keep a low profile on Facebook, you might consider emptying your profile of information you don’t want to share with people you are not directly connected to. Or, you may wish to also remove Pages/Interests from your profile to reduce the likelihood of being connected to others. A new option is becoming available which allows you to hide this information on your actual profile–again something I discovered through active searching but not made clear to me at any point during login.

A number of folks are talking about committing Facebook suicide. As we enter a new world in which our privacy is compromised without our notification, I can see the appeal.

Update, April 23

Kurt Opsahl at the Electronic Frontier Foundation also offers some detailed information on How to Opt Out of Facebook’s Instant Personalization.

One last note from me. A lot of folks recommend that you choose “Only Friends,” for many of your privacy settings. As I say to my colleagues, when it comes to Social Media, I am equal mixes of conservative, paranoid, yet adventurous. The paranoid part of me would like to recommend that you click on “Custom” for many of these settings and choose “Only Me,” for many of these settings if you really want to limit what folks can see on your profile. Why not? If they are really your friends, they know this stuff about you anyway, right?

I have been getting frequent requests for certain archived blog posts on Social Media for therapists. As a result, I’ve decided to compile them on a separate page. I will continue to blog here, but I am launching a new page: For Clinicians Using Social Media on which I will summarize all of the posts for mental health professionals as separate chapters. This page will always be accessible from the top of my main blog page.

In the coming weeks, I plan to create a similar page for the posts that are more specifically geared towards demystifying therapy for consumers.

The experiment

Last May, I decided to play around with Facebook ads, and as part of that, I created a Facebook Page for my private practice. It was an experiment and I posted as much on Twitter at the time, expressing some ambivalence and saying that I wasn’t sure if I would keep it up. I asked a few friends to help me beta test it, and over time some colleagues, students, and other folks have become Fans.

I always had some trouble with the term “Fans,” and I’ve blogged a bit about that here and discussed it in my Social Media Policy.

It occurred to me sometime in the past couple of weeks that it’s been ten months and it was time to re-evaluate. I think I’ve gathered enough data to determine that a Facebook Fan Page does not feel right for me or my practice.

My issues with the Page

I have always had mixed feelings about the Facebook Page because I worried that that it might invite clients to Fan me which could complicate the clinical relationship around boundaries and confidentiality. I also worried that it potentially exposed my personal life (friends, colleagues, and family who were Fans). I worried that if there were negative fallout, I’d feel that it had been my own doing (or undoing, as it were).

At the same time, as someone who writes about Social Media, I also wanted to carefully explore it to see if it was useful in any way.

Astute readers may have noticed that I’ve never placed a link on my website’s Contact sidebar to the Facebook Page (unlike with Twitter), primarily because I wanted the Page to bring people from Facebook to my website and not the reverse.

My experience

I haven’t encountered a single negative clinical experience with the Page since creating it. I’m pleased about this and think I’m fortunate to be able to quit while I’m ahead!

The worst that has happened is that some colleagues have questioned the wisdom of having such a Page, noting the mixed signals of having a Page that says “Become a Fan,” while limiting who can actually become a Fan.

I will never know what clients choose to keep unmentioned, but I will say that I have yet to have a client bring up my Facebook Page in a therapy session.

I also have never had a client become a Fan.

It’s certainly possible that some of the Fans of the page who I don’t recognize are clients who created a pseudonym to follow me, but I think that is highly unlikely.

Why delete it?

Ultimately, I continue to have mixed feelings about the Facebook Page.

I’m finding it to be more a source of worry than I’d like. I’m not convinced the Facebook Page adds any real value to my practice or my life from a marketing perspective or an engagement perspective. I’m also not sure that I’m offering anything new or novel on that site. Most of my professional conversations happen on Twitter, email, or on other forums for mental health professionals.

In addition, I’m not passionate about it. My energy is more invested in blogging on my own site, guest blogging, and posting on Twitter and other professional forums for therapists which reside on Ning or LinkedIn.

I engage with people on Twitter, but those conversations don’t happen directly on a page that I’m hosting, and hence and I feel more free to dip into the conversation when it moves me. With the Facebook Page, I’ve felt more responsibility to monitor who becomes a Fan or what’s written on my Wall to be sure I feel okay about everything posted there, and I find that a poor use of my time.

Thank you

I want to thank all the friends, colleagues, and supporters who helped me explore the Facebook Page in the first place and I want to remind you that if you do want to follow my blog postings or Tweets, you can always do so on my website or Twitter.

A planned termination

I plan to delete some posts over the next weeks and to delete the Facebook page entirely by the end of April, so you can all consider this a planned termination.

And if you are deeply sad about the deletion of my Page, then maybe we really do need to talk.

This article is part of an online course: Digital and Social Media Ethics for Psychotherapists for 8 CE credits

Yesterday, I posted a draft of my Social Media Policy for Psychotherapy on this blog. I also included a link on Twitter. I made it clear that this was a work in progress and asked folks to feel free to comment or suggest additions. Of all the public and private feedback I received, the section of my policy that garnered the most criticism was the part about deleting clients who become “Fans” of my Facebook Page. I appreciate the feedback, and I may modify the language of this section to soften it a bit. I also need to add sections on use of pseudonyms by both therapist and client and on consumer review sites such as Yelp and Google and Yahoo Business.

Thank you to @susangiurleo and @TriBeCaTherapy over on Twitter for some different perspectives and for raising questions about how it might affect a client to be deleted as a “Fan” from a therapist’s Page. I certainly don’t want for a client to feel hurt or rejected. The very reason I’m creating a Social Media Policy in the first place–and discussing it with clients–is to minimize the potential for such feelings of rejection. I’m making it extremely clear that this policy is universal for all clients and not personal. I’m also explaining my rationale. I want this information to be clear and accessible before such events transpire so that it’s not a mystery as to how I’ll respond. Thus far, I haven’t ever been in a position to have to delete a client from my Facebook Page. I suspect that this is because I work mostly with fairly media savvy adults who care about their privacy. Most who have any interest in my social media presence know how to access it while still retaining their privacy. But this could easily change.

I was asked why I would even create a Facebook Page if I did not wish for clients to become “Fans.” Great question. First, I am fascinated by social media and I swim in it, explore it, teach and write about it. Other clinicians consult with me both in terms of creating and modifying their own social media presence and to better understand how clients may engage online. I also work with clients who live and breathe on the Internet. It’s fairly impossible to specialize in this arena without beta testing things now and then in order to understand how they work from the inside. I also wanted to experiment with Facebook ads (which I’m no longer using) to see if I found them effective for advertising my practice. My Page was one way to attract potential clients to my content, and ultimately, my website.

I initially had strong concerns about establishing a Facebook Page because I worried that my only “Fans,” would be friends and family members and this brought up concerns about my own privacy! And yet, these were the best people to help me first experiment with the Page. I do still have some friends and family members as “Fans” of my Facebook Page. But I now also have people as “Fans,” who are trusted colleagues, clinicians in other cities who I’ve never met, and others who do not practice psychotherapy who just found and appreciate my posts. My Facebook Page allows others to read and share my postings within Facebook, which is nice for those who don’t use RSS feeds, regularly read blogs, or use Twitter.

Back to those who did not like my position on declining to have clients as “Fans.” It was pointed out that clients are grown-ups and I should not be making this decision for them. This is a valid point, but it raises some issues. Grown-up (and non-grown-up) clients may think a lot of things are okay that don’t feel okay to me in my clinical practice. Some of those things might include socializing or exchanging casual emails between sessions or feeling less concerned about the state of my record-keeping. Yes, despite my own commitment to maintaining client confidentiality, my clients themselves can choose to reveal they are in therapy with me whenever and to whomever they choose. However, this does not relieve me of my ethical obligations regarding confidentiality, or grant me permission to solicit client endorsements.

Sure, my clients are grown-ups, but I am also a grown-up running a clinical practice, and as such, I also have a right (and a responsibility) to establish policies and procedures that feel appropriate to me. My Facebook Page is part of my business and I get to set up how I’d like to conduct business on that Page. If a client wishes to disclose their therapeutic relationship with me, they always have the right and ability do so on their own Pages, profiles, blogs, or accounts.

One person said that I should not deny clients the kind of access that anyone else on the Internet has access to which was interesting. However, I am not actually limiting anyone’s access to my professional practice content or information in any way at all. Every piece of this information is on a public Page and “Fans” and “non-Fans” have the same access to it. I’m neither blocking them from accessing the Page nor preventing them from reading anything my other “Fans” can view. They can still see it, read it, share it with others, save it, and so on. The only thing they are unable to do is publicly link themselves to my Page. I fail to see how this is hurtful to a client.

I am not a rock star. I do not need my clients to be my “Fans,” particularly on a site which already has an unstable track record in regard to user privacy. The way I see it, other than the positive interpersonal exchange (pride, recognition, and other warm feelings between client and therapist), the person who stands to benefit the most from getting clients as “Fans,” on their practice Page is actually the therapist. By not accepting clients as “Fans,” I’m taking a stand against cavalier privacy policies in exchange for lower numbers. I’m willing to forgo a few extra “Fans” of my practice on Facebook if the trade-off is that those who might be curious about my clients are being told unequivocally: “You will not find people on this Page who are in treatment with me.”

Hopefully, I’m not short-changing my therapeutic relationships of the positive interactions that can still happen off of Facebook and in my actual office when clients admit that they had a desire to “Fan” or link to me. Other clients simply make mention of my blog or Twitter postings that had special meaning to them and in this way we can together acknowledge their care and interest in my work outside of the therapy room without them having to publicly endorse my presence on a website. Clearly, a client doesn’t have to be a “Fan” or “Follower” for us to both find value in these exchanges and work with the transference privately, within the walls of my office.

The beauty of office agreements and policies is that we all get to craft policies that reflect our own unique beliefs and values as clinicians. If you have a different stance on social media, patient privacy, or clinical care, then by all means create a social media policy that works for you and your practice. It would delight me to see other mental health professionals sharing different policies and agreements so that these can be accessible to clients who would like to know about your specific rules and boundaries. It would also allow clients to self-select clinicians whose policies best match their own beliefs and values. I think it would also be useful to other mental health professionals crafting their own policies to see a variety of practices related to different clinical perspectives and theoretical orientations.

Of course, I am still welcoming commentary on my own Social Media Policy which I know will evolve along with changes in the Internet. So if you have feedback, please share it via email or on Twitter.

Update: June 6, 2010

As of April, Facebook changed the “Become a Fan,” button to a “Like” button. While the terminology of the action of endorsing a page has changed, my beliefs about the problems inherent with clients “Liking” your business page on Facebook remain the same.

© 2010 Keely Kolmes, Psy.D.

To cite this page: Kolmes, K. (2010) I’m not a rock star! (More thoughts on Facebook fanning). Retrieved month/day/year from http://drkkolmes.com/2010/01/26/im-not-a-rock-star-more-thoughts-on-facebook-fanning/.

This article is part of an online course: Digital and Social Media Ethics for Psychotherapists for 8 CE credits

The past two days, a subsection of the Internet was ablaze with commentary related to the Facebook privacy changes that I blogged about yesterday. Some users didn’t mind the changes. Some didn’t realize they had lost privacy options. But those who were upset were, like me, extremely upset.

One post by Heidi N. Moore, Facebook to Privacy: Drop Dead, accurately referred to it as a “bait and switch,” and addressed why reporters may wish to keep their friend lists private. Joseph Bonneau, a security researcher, wrote Facebook Tosses Graph Privacy Into the Bin, about why friend lists should be regarded as sensitive data. And then there is Kevin Bankston of EFF’s post Facebook’s New Privacy Changes: The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly.

Since the initial changes were made, Facebook has added back the ability to hide your friend list from other users. Nevertheless, in some of my exchanges with other mental health professionals, the option of blocking users has come up more than once as a means of ensuring greater privacy. Before last night, I had never tried using the Block feature on Facebook, as the original privacy settings had met my needs well. I experimented with it yesterday and it does seem to be a useful way to restrict access to one’s profile and I can see some benefits to using it in certain situations.

That said, I have some strong objections to relying upon the Block feature as a means of restricting access to profiles, particularly when health care providers use it to Block patients.

Does it work?

My first concern is technical: blocking particular email addresses assumes that you know which email address a person is using to access their Facebook profile. Many users link multiple email addresses to their Facebook accounts, so blocking the email address you know does not completely ensure that someone doesn’t have access to you. It also doesn’t address users who have used one email address to contact you but have their mail forwarded to another address. These users may still be able to view your profile when using an email address with which you are not familiar.

More privacy infringement

My second issue is related to overall privacy violations: forcing users to choose the Block feature as the only way to restrict others’ access to their profile is simply another means of collecting data. Typing names into a Block list is one more infringement on personal privacy. When we do this, we are providing specific information to Facebook about people and saying something about our connections to them. This is much more information than I care to provide to Facebook when there is a much easier way to restrict access that does not entail my providing the company with information about my specific relationships.

Our own commitment to client privacy

Just as we expect Facebook to honor our privacy, our clients expect us to do the same. As an issue of professional ethics, it seems to me to be a violation of patient privacy to enter client names and/or email addresses into Facebook unless that is specifically indicated in our treatment contracts.

My current treatment agreement states that I keep patient information private and do not share it with others unless there is reason to believe that the patient or another individual is at risk. My policy does not indicate that I may also share client information with Facebook. It is easy to forget that when we type names into a search engine or a field on a social network, we are also sharing information with others. Doing so without, at the very least, informing our clients seems to be a breach of trust.

However, if Facebook continues to make it impossible for us to restrict profiles to users of our choosing, those of us who wish to continue using the social network in our private lives may find Block to be a useful feature. If I ever decide to employ it on my own Facebook profile, I will include a statement about this in my Social Media Policy, so that clients are aware that I do this and why. Clinicians who are already Blocking clients may wish to consider explaining that they do it not only to prevent clients from stumbling onto their interactions with others, but also to prevent therapists themselves from seeing their clients’ personal interactions with shared friends if they should have overlapping social circles.

That said, I’d greatly prefer that Facebook just do the right thing and allow their users to have back the greater control over profile privacy that they enjoyed up until just a few days ago.

References

Bankston, K. (2009, December 9) Facebook’s New Privacy Changes: The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly. Retrieved December 11, 2009 from http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2009/12/facebooks-new-privacy-changes-good-bad-and-ugly

Bonneau, J. (2009, December 11) Facebook tosses graph privacy into the bin. Retrieved December 11, 2009 from http://www.lightbluetouchpaper.org/2009/12/11/facebook-tosses-graph-privacy-into-the-bin/

Kolmes, K. (2009, December 10) How Facebook is Getting it Wrong: New Privacy Settings Offer Less Privacy. Retrieved December 11, 2009 from http://drkkolmes.com/2009/12/10/how-facebook-is-getting-it-wrong-new-privacy-settings-offer-less-privacy/

Kolmes, K. (2010, February 1) Private Practice Social Media Policy. Retrieved April 26 2010) from http://www.drkkolmes.com/docs/socmed.pdf

Moore, H. (2009, December 10) Facebook to Privacy: Drop Dead. Retrieved December 10, 2009 from http://www.thebigmoney.com/blogs/sausage/2009/12/10/facebook-privacy-drop-dead

Muller, A.Y. (2009, December 9) Updates on Your New Privacy Tools. Retrieved December 11, 2009 from http://blog.facebook.com/blog.php?post=197943902130

© 2009 Keely Kolmes, Psy.D.

To cite this page: Kolmes, K. (2009) Should mental health professionals block clients on Facebook? Retrieved month/day/year from http://drkkolmes.com/2009/12/11/should-mental-health-professionals-block-clients-on-facebook/.

Facebook implemented some updated privacy features this week which were supposed to give users greater control over their privacy settings. However, alarmingly, some of the updates have left previously protected information exposed. As a mental health professional, I am deeply troubled by these changes, both in terms of how it compromises my own personal privacy, and for how it affects the privacy of my clients.

But one doesn’t have to be a mental health professional or a client to be affected by the changes made by Facebook. We all deserve personal privacy and I feel that the ways in which profiles have become more visible have not been adequately addressed in Facebook’s statements to users.

Here is Facebook’s updated privacy statement from their Help page:

Some settings are changing with the recent updates to Facebook privacy, but Facebook’s commitment to providing you control over your information is not. Here’s a summary of what’s changing:

* The Privacy page has been simplified, and in that process, some settings have been consolidated. For security reasons, you will now be required to enter your password if you’d like to update your privacy settings.

* A privacy control has been added to the publisher at the top of your home and profile page. This allows you to set privacy on individual posts. For example, you could post a status to Everyone or only to Friends. Learn more on the Publisher help page.

* Instead of having networks for regions (eg., Australia or New York City), people’s locations are now listed in the “Current City” or “Current Region” field of their profiles. This means if you use the “Friends and Networks” privacy setting, the networks part only applies to work and school networks.

* A basic set of information is publicly available, meaning it’s visible to anyone that’s able to navigate to your profile, applications you use on Facebook, and websites you connect with via Facebook. This information includes your name, profile picture, gender, current city, networks, friend list, and Pages. Any additional information (eg., photos or videos) will only be exposed if your privacy settings allow it.

Keep in mind that anyone who navigates to your profile will be able to view your publicly available information and information you’ve made visible to Everyone. In addition, your profile picture appears in places you make comments and posts. You can always change your current profile picture or lower your search visibility if you choose.

Here are some of the changes that are particularly unsettling to me as a mental health professional who works with many people who had opted for great profile invisibility in the previous version of Facebook:

No more hiding your email from email searches

Previously, you could opt-out of email searches so that you (or your patients) could choose not to have every person they’d ever contacted via email be able to find their Facebook profile. Now, there is no longer an option of hiding yourself from email searches. This means that Facebook gives you the illusion of invisibility by giving you the choice of omitting yourself from a general Facebook search (which you do by going to Privacy > Search and limiting your profile to be seen by “Only Friends,” and disallowing Indexing from search engines. Nevertheless, hundreds of people can still find your profile, depending upon the number of people with whom you have exchanged email using the email address that is linked to your Facebook account.

Why is this disturbing? First, it’s simply misleading since many users will assume that their profile is hidden due to tweaking their Search settings. Second, by making it impossible for you to hide yourself from email searches, your Facebook profile will show up to anyone who uses “Find Friends,” in the email search to find users in their address book. That means your profile is really visible to more than “Friends Only.” While many Facebook users like to be found by random (and not-so-random) people, there are many of users who would prefer that their profiles would not be visible to others, including health care providers they’ve exchanged email with, clients they work with in a professional setting, co-workers, exes, or people who have stalked, harassed, or abused them in some fashion in the past. Users no longer have the choice to choose true privacy.

As an experiment, I tried what seemed to be a simple work-around to this: changing the email address that is associated with one’s Facebook account. But after creating a new email address for my Facebook profile and removing the old email address associated with my account, my profile and original email account still come up in other users’ “Find Friends” email searches. It is unclear to me whether this will update over time. However, changes in privacy settings on Facebook usually update immediately, so it’s of some concern that this is not updating after I’ve removed an email address from my account.

Friends lists unveiled

“All friends,” are now visible on all user profiles, once you’ve navigated to the profile. As a psychologist, and semi-private person, hiding my own friends list was a feature that I particularly liked on Facebook. It allowed me to participate in online culture while still enjoying having a (semi) private personal life. Friends of mine could always see if we had friends in common, but I employed settings that allowed me to keep my total list of friends for my eyes only if we did not share friends. I felt that allowing all people in my life a list of all my friends was more information than I wanted to share and I liked having that choice.

This choice is also gone now. I find it especially troubling now to think that there is no way to keep curious strangers, professional contacts, or previous acquaintances from clicking on a user profile and seeing who all their friends are. Many people may not care about hiding this information, but to remove the option for people to select a privacy level is problematic. It also allows any user to navigate to another users profile if the person knows which friends of theirs to target in a search. Again, I see this as having potential safety implications for people.

Profile Photos and Comments Are Now Visible

With the new settings, if you default to your previous privacy settings it gives you the impression that others cannot view your photo and the rest of your profile. Not exactly true. This actually entails additional steps in which you must go to your Profile Photo Album and reconfigure the settings for that album.

Previously, you could make it so that your photo showed up as a generic figure when another user viewed your wall posting and someone who was not your friend could not access any part of your profile.

No more.

Now, your Profile Photo shows up anywhere you post anything and any user can click on that photo or icon or name to view your basic profile. Furthermore, that user can then click on your Profile Photo and see all of your profile photos, including any comments made on them by other users. You can hide this, but this setting has to be adjusted separately and many users will remain unaware that a big piece of their personal information can be viewed by others.

In the name of beta testing, I tried this by clicking on the profile of an old college friend who had previously denied my friend request because….well, I’m not sure exactly. But let’s just assume that this user has stricter friending criteria than I do. In the past, this person’s profile just showed me a generic illustration for her photo. But when I clicked on that illustration today, I was able to view six profile photos, including her family photos and other people’s comments on them.

This is a huge breach of privacy for many people who thought they were hiding this information from others.

Facebook is giving people the illusion that they are making their profile more private, when an unlimited number of people now have greater access to user profiles. Some users will not be savvy enough to even recognize how much more information is visible to others who they do not want to have access to this information.

That’s just wrong.

Update: December 11, 2009

Seems that Facebook has responded to user outrage and added back the ability to hide “All Friends” on profiles.