Parental involvement in children's Facebook activities is essential

Technically only children aged 13 and older may register and maintain Facebook profiles but, in practice, children younger than this are active on Facebook. Children being active on the Internet poses a number of challenges, especially to their privacy and safety so it is essential that parents supervise their children when they use online services. If you are interested in finding out more, take a look at our post about what parents can do to better protect their children's privacy online.

Mashable published an infographic in a post titled "Most Parents Monitor Kids on the Internet – And Have Their Passwords" which is worth reading.

Facebook's Timeline and fears about "frictionless experiences"

One of the concerns about the now delayed Facebook Timeline is the "frictionless experiences" concept. This is an aspect of the next iteration of the Facebook Open Graph and what it means is that users will make fewer conscious decisions about which of their experiences they share on Facebook once the new Timeline is enabled.

The process, as I understand it, is as follows: as a Facebook user with Timeline enabled for your account you visit a partner website or add a partner's application to your Timeline. When you do this, you should be presented with a permissions dialogue which will probably look a little like this:

The permissions dialogue should inform you what levels of access to your Timeline the service or application requires as well as who updates from the service or application will be visible to. This is a variation of the current permissions dialogues which pop up whenever an application requires access to your Facebook profile. The current dialogues look something like this permissions dialogue from Color, a photography application which is integrating with Facebook:

While the new permissions dialogue looks somewhat less emphatic than the current ones (the permissions you grant are somewhat understated in the new dialogues), you are still required to agree to give the service or application access to your profile information in advance. The big difference between the current permissions model and the new one is that granting a service or application permission to access your new Timeline is something of a "fire and forget" process. You should be asked to give permission up front and, once given, you won't be asked to give permission again. What's not clear is whether services or applications you have already authorised must be re-authorised once Timelines go live or whether your old permissions carry across.

The reason why this is a worry for many privacy advocates is that your activities on websites you have authorised or making use of authorised applications will automatically appear in your Timeline without the need to "Like" something, as we currently do. This could lead to some embarrassment or even real harm if you, for example, engage in an activity you would prefer your Facebook friends not become aware of.

While this is certainly a concern for many users, this new functionality serves as a reminder that users shouldn't sit back and expect Facebook to proactively protect their privacy to their satisfaction. Facebook's recent changes to users' privacy controls and options signal a concerted move towards better privacy protections in some respects but Facebook remains a business that profits from users exhibitionism. Users simply must take more responsibility for their personal information and must familiarize themselves with the controls being made available to them. These controls include who you share your posts and updates with; which services and applications you authorize and who those services and applications may share your activities with.

Facebook's Timeline is going to change how we share on the social Web in fairly profound, although not immediately apparent, ways. The Timeline is am ambitious tool to remake Facebook as the record of your life. It is still up to you to decide how much of that to share and with whom although some of those choices are being made for you.

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Photo credit: Facebook's f8 albums

Timelines.com sues to block Facebook's public Timeline rollout

Update: Mashable has since updated its post to note that while the court filings don't mention Facebook's decision to delay activating Timeline for its users, there is apparently a message from Facebook indicating that Timeline will go public on 6 October 2011.

History oriented Web service, Timelines.com, has applied to the United States District Court for the Northern District of Illinois for an order preventing Facebook from releasing its profile revamp, known as Timeline, to the general public.

The reconceptualised Facebook profile exposes users' historical activity using a fairly clever timeline feature which allows visitors to a user's profile page to go back in time and view photos, posts and other activities in a user's past. The Facebook Timeline converts what is currently a fairly narrow view of a user's life into a life history with past events generally as accessible as more current events. Its a fairly radical approach to Facebook profiles which has privacy advocates concerned, largely because posts on a user's profile will be given a more comprehensive context based on the user's publicly accessible life history.

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Timelines.com:

The Facebook Timeline:

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In the proceedings instituted by Timelines.com, the history site has raised concerns that Facebook's brand choice, "Timeline", will effectively obscure the more established Timelines.com trade mark to the point where Web users will identify the trade mark with Facebook's brand and not with the history site. The effect, allegedly, is that the history site will lose traffic and users due to the confusion. Going further, Timelines.com has contended that Facebook's planned functionality mirrors its own to a degree –

… a user can record a personal or historic event that he or she wants to share with the world, ranging from a daughter’s one year birthday party or a family wedding to an obscure basketball game or a much more public event like the Inauguration of President Obama. In connection with any such posted event, any user who accesses the website can add additional or new Content for that event.

Timelines.com's complaint goes further to suggest that Facebook is very much aware of the similarities between the brands and is taking steps to redirect traffic intended for Timelines.com through its Facebook page to the Facebook page dealing with its Timeline feature –

Facebook understands that this has created confusion, because Timelines recently learned that Facebook is re-directing Internet users attempting to access Timelines’ Facebook page to Facebook’s new product offering which Facebook has confusingly named “Timeline.”Put another way, a user who tries to access Timelines’ Facebook page is, instead, redirected toFacebook’s “Timeline” offering. See www.facebook.com/timelines

Timelines.com alleged that its Facebook page had become inaccessible but when I tried the link, it appeared to have been restored.

This complaint (embedded below) is a combination of a trade mark infringement complaint and a sort of unlawful competition complaint which seems to be premised more on Facebook's sheer size and its ability to manipulate traffic across its site from Timelines.com's page to its own Timeline publicity pages. It also reads a little like a monopoly-based competition complaint in the sense that Facebook is, by far, the dominant social network on the Web with more than 800 million users. Assuming that Timelines.com's allegations about the similarities of the its service and the new Facebook Timeline are accurate, launching the Facebook Timeline with the same name could well put Timelines.com out of business through sheer numbers. The trade mark angle is probably the bigger stick in Timelines.com's arsenal although what would be more interesting is if this situation gave rise to an anti-trust complaint of some sort. With a user base larger than the United States if it were a country, Facebook is in a unique position to shape much of the social Web, even if that includes shuttering smaller, niche competitors along the way.

According to Mashable (my source for this post) –

The judge in Timelines.com’s patent lawsuit declined the site’s request to disable users from signing on through the developer program. He did, however, order Facebook to report daily how many new developers were enabling the Timeline.

The public launch of Timeline is now at least delayed until Tuesday, when representatives from Facebook and Timelines.com will meet again in front of another federal judge to debate whether an injunction should be issued against Facebook.

There are rumors that Facebook is planning a follow-up to its F8 announcements (where Timeline was revealed) at tomorrow's Apple event (rumored to be when the next iPhone will be announced) as part of an initiative to bring Apple and Facebook closer together. Timelines.com's complaint could be its last attempt to stave off its own extinction and a real spanner in the works for Facebook, particularly if it has merit.

The complaint

Timelines v Facebook