Facebook's new timeline - laying out your past, and there's no going back from this privacy minefield

You might want to think very carefully before upgrading to Facebook's new timeline.

It brings additional visibility to older posts, sometimes from many years ago.

No problem, you might think.  But you better be sure, for once users sign up to the new timeline it's a one-way street. Facebook gives you 7 days to manage old posts before they become visible, and we found no way of delaying or stopping this process; but you can, of course, speed it up.

UPDATE: privacy worries explained - it's all about choice & control.

One thread on Facebook's Help Centre has (at the time of writing) 380 responses to a request to turn the feature off, many pleading for an answer.

Timeline "preview" - you have 7 days to sort your past.

On the surface the new feature doesn't sound too problematic. It provides a neat way of scrolling back through a user's older posts. It doesn't alter the privacy settings of those posts, and in some respects the information's already 'out there', so there's no problem, right?

Not quite. The Timeline feature brings your past to the present. Facebook automatically selects a collection of pictures and updates from each year and presents them as "highlights". One click and I'm back to 2007 and a selection of pictures before I got married.

It's up to the user to manage what's shown - if you have the time to do this. Before you know it, your digital exhaust stretching back many years is easily browsable and visible to friends - and possibly everyone, depending on your privacy settings.


New friends, old friends

Ever stopped to make sure a certain person isn't a Facebook friend before posting a status update? If so, make sure you never add that person to your friends list, ever. In our testing we found new 'friends' had visibility of posts made before becoming 'friends', despite ensuring old posts had their visibility set to 'friends only'.

The timeline goes back to a user's first post. How many people have changed partners since creating their Facebook page? Do we really want to be serving pictures of our past life on a plate to our new partners?


Privacy blunders of a past life brought back to life

Not only have most users' friends lists evolved, but both Facebook and its users have gone through a learning curve with privacy controls.

In the early days the default settings for a new account were incredibly open; posts could be read by a wide audience. Privacy controls were hidden away and many found them hard to understand, so it's likely people made privacy blunders in the early days; blunders that may, luckily, have gone unnoticed...

Limit The Audience, but there's a limit to the limit

... But now the past is being brought back to life, and users have to actively hunt down an option under "Privacy Settings" to "Limit the Audience for Past Posts". If you didn't know the option existed, you wouldn't think to go there.

Even still the minimum "limit" on audience is "Friends only", and as I mentioned earlier, this doesn't take into account who you were friends with back at the time of posting.   The updates I made in 2007 were intended for a different audience.


On the plus side... Hitting home

To be fair to Facebook all the posts on the new timeline were already available, if you knew where to look. 

In some respects this new feature demonstrates the permanence of what we choose to share. It rams home the adage "the internet never forgets".

People might in future be more wary and stop to think whether they want all future partners to know who they did last summer.


On the down side... Knowing too much, a generation of snoopers

But there's an insidious nature to the new feature in that it seems to encourage revisiting often very personal details of a person's past. I believe you can know too much about a person.

Making the information easily available turns us into a generation of snoopers - the temptation's just too great and, no matter how strong-willed you are, going back through a person's past may alter how you feel towards them. It can fundamentally alter relationships. [ref required - there is at least one relevant study in this area]


Choice? What choice?

I can understand Facebook wanting to offer this as an option.  Some people might really like and appreciate the additional visibility.  Indeed, even a majority of users might want this, go ahead and let them choose.

But, once installed, we found no way of turning the new timeline off.

After selecting the new timeline, users are given up to 7 days to "preview" the new front page and manage the posts available (I shudder to think how many I've made since joining in 2005). When the 7 days expires, it goes live regardless.  Again we found nothing to stop the process.

Yes, these posts were still visible despite Timeline, but the message here is that we all make mistakes.  Perhaps some people wrote crap they wish they'd never written.  They probably felt silly the next day but otherwise got away with it.

But look here, privacy doubters, I'm not saying Facebook is evil and should be banned and I'm not saying this new feature is outright bad.  In fact I'm saying it has many elements that are good that some people may enjoy.

I'm saying it might not be for everyone, and I'm saying people might not understand this feature isn't for them until they've tried it.

I doubt many Facebook users, myself included, fully understand the long term implications of everything they choose to disclose at the time of disclosure.  Some may prefer to leave the past largely hidden, even if it is still there for those who know how to find it.

Privacy is largely about respecting choice and it's incorrigible that there's no clear option to go back and turn this feature off.


Hiding the past

We couldn't find a way to turn the new timeline off, so we looked for other options.  Reduce visibility of past posts?  As mentioned above, the tools we found still leave posts visible to 'friends'.  There's no 'me only' option.

Given there's no getting rid of the new timeline it would be really nice to return some control to users in this way.  I'd actually like to see even more control provided - to change visibility of posts over n years old.

So I've turned on the feature, discovered all the old pictures of my ex are flaunted on my timeline for my new parter to see, not to mention the PPAs (public posts of affection), and I'm panicking.

Delete past posts?  Whilst some say this can be done using scripting, we found no configuration option for a standard user to do this.

It seems the only options are:

1. 'Unfriend' your new partner
2. Manually review potentially years of past posts
3. Delete your Facebook account

Let's hope Facebook don't force users to adopt the new timeline, or provide improved bulk management of past posts before they do.  These privacy features also need to be easier to find from the timeline preview page, and I see no reason why the preview should forcibly end after 7 days.

Allowing users to hide old posts returns control to those who want it.  Some people prefer to start from a clean sheet, then select which posts to make visible, rather than select those to hide.  We don't all want to have our entire digital past laid out before our 'friends' of the present.

@JamesFirth