Previous page: Facebook privacy concerns
IDGNS: How effective is that, considering you can get an e-mail address anytime without any verification as to who you are? Isn't this a cat-and-mouse game?
Kelly: This is where the social factor of Facebook's real-name culture comes in and the privacy controls that we have. Those are very effective in protecting people from those who might attempt to misrepresent themselves. But we also want to make sure that anyone who would do our users harm is easily excluded, and this bill will help with that quite a bit.
IDGNS: How feasible is it to come up with a tool or technology that lets social-networking site operators verify people's ages, in particular to identify -- and thus more closely protect -- underage users?
Kelly: You can have effective indicators of whether or not someone is actually a member of a community, like a high school. Facebook has always had technology to try to determine whether someone is a member of a network or not, and has restricted access to their information based on that. That has a great effect in pushing towards a type of proxy age verification. It's not perfect, though, and a lot of the discussions of age verification have focused on attempting perfection in determining whether or not someone is of a certain age, and that type of perfection can't be legislated effectively.
IDGNS: A couple of weeks ago MySpace and almost all state attorneys general announced an initiative outlining safety guidelines for social networking sites. Is that something Facebook plans to sign on to?
Kelly: That agreement substantially reflected an agreement we had previously reached with Attorney General Cuomo, and we're very glad that MySpace has stepped up in this effort. We think that going forward, there will be a variety of principles agreed upon among certain leading Internet sites.
IDGNS: Is it fair to say that the relationship between U.S. state attorneys general and social networking companies has significantly improved in recent months? It used to be quite adversarial and contentious.
Kelly: At Facebook, we've always tried to maintain a very open and honest dialogue with all the attorneys general and law enforcement agencies, and I think we're getting to a very good point with these law enforcement agencies and the industry in a broader way.
IDGNS: How realistic is it to expect a site like Facebook, which has about 60 million active users, to properly monitor what so many people are doing to prevent inappropriate or illegal behaviour?
Kelly: We use very sophisticated social designs in terms of limiting access to people's information based on networks that they share in their real-world lives, and further we use technology to look for anomalous behaviour, things that may be concerning. It helps to keep our users safer, and also prevent spam and create a more comfortable environment for our users. We have a pretty large customer service team which deals with both reports and with the potentially anomalous behaviour highlighted by the technology.
IDGNS: Have you improved your response times when members report complaints about content or actions on the site? That seemed to be a big complaint Attorney General Cuomo's office had with Facebook at some point.
Kelly: Yes, absolutely.
IDGNS: Does Facebook do enough to make sure its average member understands how to manage the very granular privacy settings you offer?
Kelly: I think the average Facebook user understands very well that we take privacy extraordinarily seriously. There's always a balance to be struck between the ease of use and completeness in providing privacy control. We try to strike that balance very well, but we always listen to user feedback about that in terms of how we give them more control over what information they share and with whom.
IDGNS: How much monitoring do you do of, say, photos or videos uploaded to the site? Do those go through automated screening, or do you depend more on members manually flagging stuff they see?
Kelly: Most of the automated tools we've tested in terms of recognizing inappropriate images and things like that are ineffective. We've found that users are some of the best reporters on that, and our reporting infrastructure is extraordinarily effective in removing inappropriate content quickly and in holding those users who attempt to post them responsible by cutting off their account.
IDGNS: As chief privacy officer, what are some of your goals for this year?
Kelly: As the site and the Internet as a whole evolve, we want to continue giving people a great deal of control over what personal information they share and with whom. We want to continue to reflect the social graph very accurately, and privacy is a critical part of that, so we'll continue to bake it into the design of the site and provide people with the most effective privacy controls on the Internet.
Related content:
Government faces Facebook reality
Facebook ban a knee-jerk reaction, say experts
Web 2.0: Government's social networking debate
icon.
