By Mike Torres

Online communities have been around for longer than the World Wide Web itself, yet never before has so much personal information been available through public means. The explosion of social networking services like MySpace, Facebook, and Windows Live Spaces (formerly MSN Spaces) -- and the corresponding increase in the utility of modern search engines -- has made it easy to uncover even the most obscure details about people. Yet it isn’t always apparent to people which aspects of their personal life are available to classmates, friends, or complete strangers through search engines or social networking services.

Social networking services are all about the sharing of information; without their capacity for connecting thousands of individuals who do not know each other personally, some services wouldn’t have enough critical mass to exist. Yet sharing any type of data without understanding the implications of sharing information and the limits one can place around access to the data can lead to dangerous situations. In this brave new world of massively connected online services, how do you design a service to be social -- to encourage discovery and sharing -- while maintaining end-user privacy?

While designing succeeding iterations of Windows Live Spaces, a worldwide social networking and blogging service that now attracts more than 140 million unique users monthly, the team responsible for its development has followed the following basic guidelines:

1. Keep messages to customers clear and consistent throughout the product or service. Don’t switch tense or tone, and try to write in an easy-to-follow manner, as if you’re talking to users over their shoulder. Ask questions within the user interface like “Which permissions setting should I choose?” accompanied by text educating users on their options.  
2. Reinforce, reinforce, reinforce. Use the real estate provided on the Web page to inform people about when and how their information is shared -- even if it sometimes feels like overkill. One of the tricks we use in Windows Live Spaces: A contextual pane sits on the screen at all times and is used to educate people about ways to set their privacy preferences. Users shouldn’t have to dig through FAQs and help pages to learn about ways you’re helping ensure their privacy.  
3. Don’t use conditional logic when it comes to privacy defaults. In other words, pick default settings and always use them -- don’t change them based on time of day! For example, if entry points to your product or service can be discovered in multiple ways, each point should result in the same privacy defaults. It’s better to choose a setting and stick to it than get fancy and confuse people.  
4. When designing the user interface, it’s essential to choose end-user control over aesthetics. Users entrust social networking sites with personal information, and it is important to make sure they can control access to it at all times. For example, providing advanced privacy options -- such as the ability to give selected individuals access to a phone number -- may sometimes be necessary depending on the context, even if the resulting user interface isn’t the most pleasing to the eye.  
5. Assume by default that people don’t want total strangers to email, instant-message, or call them. Give people the option to enable access to them if you see fit, but default to a trusted set of people first (existing IM contacts, family, friends, or friends of friends) and let users open it up from there.  

Mike Torres is a lead program manager on the Windows Live Spaces team responsible for social networking and other features forming group connectedness. He can be reached at http://spaces.msn.com/mike. Mike's new book, Share Your Story: Blogging With MSN Spaces, is now available from Microsoft Press and can be found on Mike’s space.

 

Ponemon Institute