Privacy profiles can help easily set default usages.

[teddevito]

Title
Privacy profiles can help easily set default usages.

Short, concise description of the idea
On the privacy tab of the account page, offering profiles of privacy settings will help users like me setup my blog easily for my intended use.

Full description of the ideaI compare the idea to privacy settings in internet explorer, where there are

Comments

[lied_ohne_worte]

I think this is problematic because there are no real "default usages". The only two I can think of are "keep everything as private as possible" and "make everything as visible as possible". Everything in between are shades of grey. There are people who have public journals but don't want them to be indexed by search engines; there are people who don't care that everyone sees their location on their profile page but would never give out their true age, but there are also people for whom it is the other way round.

Giving people pre-determined levels of "no, low, medium" and "high" security (which is what I assume you'd like to do) means that everyone who is not on one of the extreme ends of this scale might be pre-selecting exactly the one setting that is wrong for them and gets them into trouble later on. Guarding your privacy on the internet is becoming more and more important, and learning how to protect yourself might require a bit of a learning curve. But this learning process is really the only way you can be sure that you control what happens to your information as much as possible. I think pre-selected "profiles" would lead to many users being less, not more secure.

[azurelunatic]

To do it right, you'd want a massive study of common use cases and settings across LJ.

If I were designing it, I would:
Determine which settings were the privacy settings
Data mine everybody's privacy settings (stripped of identifiable information and kept internally; you would probably first pull it by user number and then replace the user number with an arbitrarily generated ID number in case the data ever was compromised) and see what combinations people have picked
Tabulate the results (okay, 50% of the population has the defaults, 10% has the "I am underage" defaults, 5% has this exact combination, etc.)
Offer a voluntary survey to the site's population, asking what they use their journal for (with the ability to write in an answer as well as pick preset options), show them the settings they currently have, and ask them to explain their reason for picking each setting (both preset options, including "it was the default", "a friend or a technical support person told me I should choose this", and other things, and a write-in).
The results of the survey would be looked at two ways:
a) in a group with others who have chosen the same exact profile (all answers to question 5 together, all answers to question 6 together)
b) in a group with others who have chosen the same setting for that option (but not necessarily the whole profile)

After the survey analysis people get through with it, user-facing staff and senior volunteers would get to look at it or the conclusions. Devs, user-facing staff, and optionally senior volunteers would suggest profiles based on this.

It would then get tossed to feedback for users to take a look at, and do another round or two if necessary.

[azurelunatic]

I'm apprenticing myself to brilliant people and applying what I learn. (This is a direct result of having worked in consumer research and D having done the user card sort to build the Dreamwidth menus: why have people with preconceptions guess when you can mine your data and do a survey? Then you can let your experts out.)

[azurelunatic]

Oh, and you'd want to sort out users vs. communities, see if there were any differences between user privacy settings and community ones, and offer the opportunity to be surveyed to maintainers.

[lady_angelina]

This.

If anything, I would much rather have the account set-up process to go through a "wizard" of steps to set individual security settings, each with a FAQ link attached in case the user needs more information. And until that process was done, the defaults would all be the most secure of settings (i.e. show birthdate/location/contact info/etc. to no one, minimize inclusion in search engines, always log all IP addresses, and so on). The two exceptions I can think of at the moment would be to allow comments to everyone and to post entries as Friends-only by default. But the preset security settings would make my life so much easier because I'm not scrambling to get to the page that lets me select the "minimize inclusion" box before some search engine can index it. =P

(Of course, this is probably not only infeasible, but might create more work for Support volunteers, much as I would imagine that the original suggestion would, too.)