When Facebook first launched in 2004, it was initially only available to students at Harvard University. The idea was to create a digital version of the physical facebooks that some US colleges and universities handed out to incoming students, allowing them to get to know basic information about their fellow classmates.
In the early days of Facebook, the default privacy setting was that all your information was visible to everyone else on Facebook. The only exception was your email address and phone number, which were not visible to anyone.
As Facebook expanded beyond just Harvard students, the default privacy setting changed so that your information was now only visible to others within your own regional college/university network. However, you could expand this to share your info with all college/university networks on Facebook if you wanted.
It wasn’t until late 2005 that Facebook introduced what would become its iconic privacy setting: Friends Only. This allowed users to specify that their information could only be seen by people they confirmed as friends on the network.
The Introduction of Friends Lists
In April 2008, about four years after launch, Facebook introduced Friends Lists. This feature allowed users to organize their friends into different groupings or lists, such as “Close Friends,” “Work Friends,” “Family,” etc.
When posting content, users could now choose to share that content with one or more specific Friends Lists instead of just “All Friends.” This gave users the ability to share posts with only certain groups of their friends rather than all friends.
Friends of Friends Setting Launches
In October 2009, Facebook launched another major expansion of its privacy settings called Friends of Friends.
Up until this point, users could share content with Friends, Networks (the regional college/university networks) or Everyone.
The new Friends of Friends option added the ability to share content with “Friends of Friends” – aka friends of your friends on Facebook. This essentially widened the scope of visibility from just your direct friends list to friends of those friends.
Some key things about the new Friends of Friends option:
- It was opt-in only. Friends of Friends was not the default for any content.
- Users could selectively choose which types of content they wanted to be visible to Friends of Friends. For example, you could make photos visible to Friends of Friends but keep posts to just Friends.
- On your own profile page, you could view a list of who exactly could see each post based on your privacy settings. This “Visibility” link showed you all your Friends of Friends.
This was Facebook’s first attempt at expanding visibility beyond a user’s direct social circle on the network. It opened content to “friends of friends” – but it was clear who those people were and users had full control.
Criticism of the Friends of Friends Setting
While many saw Friends of Friends as a logical incremental expansion of privacy settings, it also received some criticism:
- It increased visibility of user data to networks of people they didn’t actually know. Sharing to “friends of friends” meant potentially sharing with hundreds or thousands of strangers.
- The term “Friends” was misleading – most people thought of Friends as their direct contacts. But “Friends of Friends” took visibility far beyond that.
- Users could accidentally change settings and share content more widely than intended. The UI controls were complex.
- There were concerns about Facebook apps being able to gain access to data shared with Friends of Friends without proper user controls.
However, the feature also had supporters who saw it as a balanced approach that gave users flexibility over visibility. Both sides largely agreed that clear controls and informed consent were paramount.
Developing Criticism of Facebook Privacy
The Friends of Friends debate in 2009 coincided with increasing public scrutiny over Facebook’s privacy practices in general:
- Facebook had introduced News Feed in 2006, aggregating friends’ activities, which many criticized as a breach of privacy expectations.
- Beacon, launched in 2007, published user actions on third-party sites back to Facebook for friends to see until a public outcry led to its shutdown.
- Facebook’s privacy settings and policies were often changing, creating user confusion over how their data was being used or shared.
This rising tide of criticism set the stage for the next phase of debate around Friends of Friends.
Friends of Friends Setting Removed
In late 2009, Facebook began rolling out its next major redesign of the platform, known as Facebook Modern. Part of this redesign eliminated the Friends of Friends privacy setting.
Some key details on the removal of Friends of Friends:
- Facebook asserted the setting was confusing and not widely used. But critics argued it provided an important intermediate level of sharing between friends and true public.
- All content previously shared to Friends of Friends was automatically reduced to being shared with only Friends after the setting removal.
- A new setting called Lists was introduced, which allowed creating custom lists of friends to share with – but these lists had to be manually created rather than dynamically derived as Friends of Friends had been.
Removal of the Friends of Friends setting marked a key turning point where Facebook began encouraging more public and open sharing. But it remained controversial given the privacy implications.
Facebook’s Shift Towards More Open Sharing
The steps Facebook took after removing Friends of Friends signaled a philosophical shift toward more openness:
- Public search was introduced in 2010, allowing anyone to search and view public posts.
- Hashtags were introduced in 2013 to encourage viral public sharing.
- Default privacy settings for posts were set to “Public” for new users later in 2013.
- Celebrity, media and brand content was increasingly mixed into the News Feed to drive engagement.
Facebook was pushing sharing beyond just one’s social circles, aiming for viral reach, engagement and data sharing.
Ongoing Criticism of Facebook Privacy
Facebook continued facing criticism about its privacy approach:
- Privacy advocates argued Facebook had progressively weakened controls on data sharing with external parties.
- Academic studies found users had little understanding of complex privacy controls or how their data was used.
- The FTC fined Facebook $5 billion in 2019 for privacy violations related to the Cambridge Analytica scandal involving misuse of user data.
But despite backlash, engagement-driven open sharing remained core to Facebook’s model for monetizing their platform.
Where Privacy Settings Stand Today
Currently in 2023, Facebook has maintained Public as the default visibility setting for posts for new users.
For those who want to limit visibility, the main options are:
- Friends: Limits visibility to confirmed friends.
- Specific Friends Lists: Share to a custom-defined list of friends instead of all friends.
- Only Me: Limits visibility only to yourself.
But there remains no setting equivalent to Friends of Friends that bridges the gap between Friends and fully public.
Many privacy advocates continue to criticize Facebook’s approach and argue for reintroduction of intermediate sharing controls like Friends of Friends. But Facebook has given no indication of plans to bring back those settings at this time.
The Tradeoff Between Utility and Privacy
The history of Facebook’s privacy controls involves a tension between utility and privacy:
- On one hand, wider sharing expands the utility people gain from an open social platform.
- But on the other hand, it raises risks of oversharing personal information with strangers.
Facebook leaned into the utility side over time, but not without costs to privacy.
Conclusion
The rise and fall of Facebook’s Friends of Friends privacy setting reflects the shifting sands of Facebook’s privacy norms over nearly two decades:
- What began as a closed private network opened up over time driven by engagement incentives.
- But this opening triggered recurring public concern and criticism around privacy controls.
- Facebook repeatedly had to reform policies, but the core thrust towards openness remained.
Debates continue around whether Facebook does enough to empower user privacy. But for now, sharing settings remain much more open by default than the site’s early years. The Friends of Friends setting is an artifact of a past era before Facebook’s full evolution into a public social media giant.