pii2014: Building Privacy at Facebook: Products, Programs, and Infrastructure

Matt Scutari, Manager, Privacy and Public Policy: Facebook
Paddy Underwood, Product Manager, Facebook

Matt: talking about privacy, products, amazing people. “Making the world more open and connected” does not mean making everyone’s information more public. Social networks that existed before Facebook were more open. Facebook brought the ability to share selectively with 1.35B people. Privacy is fundamental to building our products. Three pillars of privacy: 1: Our privacy program. 2: infrastructure. 3: the product.

Privacy program: mission is to ensure that key stakeholders review and approve every product we ship that will impact people’s data. Privacy program management team, talk with relevant stakeholders (legal and policy, maybe IT and communications). Iterative process–simple emails or weeks/months involving Sr. level.

Paddy: I run the privacy infrastructure team. Mission is to build core infrastructure. We do 80T privacy checks per pay, 56B per minute. Privacy products: help people share what they want with exactly who they want. How: focus on user feedback. Make privacy better by: survey 4K people daily, weekly user experience lab, product specialists reviewing bug reports and feedback, other. Minority of users are American, so we also research others around the world.

Privacy checkup goal: help people check some key privacy settings to make sure they’re sharing with who they want (key idea: review). Checkup process overview: alert notice, survey, review apps that have access, user profile.

Matt: a great example of cross-functional process,

Paddy: which profile fields would we show? Add links to actual profile with more choices. Lessons learned:

People used it: 86% finished all steps. 81% found it helpful. Breaking important privacy controls into lightweight chunks made it a positive experience. People wanted to do checkup later, and blue dinosaur was friendly. Added access to the toolbar.

Audience: unanticipated changes in policy, and do users know how much data is actually being collected?

Paddy: we’re trying hard to work with, listen to feedback.

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