When Mark Zuckerberg unveiled Facebook’s new Timeline feature at the company’s Sept. 22, 2011 f8 developer conference, he described it as “The story of your life . . . .  All the stuff from your life.”  According to a Sept. 22, 2011 Facebook Blog post,

The way your profile works today, 99% of the stories you share vanish. The only way to find the posts that matter is to click “Older Posts” at the bottom of the page. Again. And again.

. . .

With timeline [sic], now you have a home for all the great stories you’ve already shared. They don’t just vanish as you add new stuff.

The Timeline announcement came toward the end of an investigation by the Federal Trade Commission into Facebook’s privacy practices, culminating in the Commission’s Nov. 29, 2011 announcement that Facebook had agreed to settle FTC charges “that it deceived consumers by telling them they could keep their information on Facebook private, and then repeatedly allowing it to be shared and made public.”  In general outline, the FTC said, the proposed settlement

bars Facebook from making any further deceptive privacy claims, requires that the company get consumers’ approval before it changes the way it shares their data, and requires that it obtain periodic assessments of its privacy practices by independent, third-party auditors for the next 20 years.

Three days before the Dec. 30, 2011 close of the 30-day comment period on the proposed settlement, privacy rights organization Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) urged the FTC to investigate whether Facebook’s new Timeline feature complies with the terms of the proposed settlement.  Echoing some of the concerns it raised in a Sept. 29, 2011 letter to the FTC regarding “frictionless sharing,” EPIC’s Dec. 27, 2011 letter to the FTC asked the Commission to

determine whether Facebook’s deployment of ‘Timeline’ complies with the Commission’s recent order In the Matter of Facebook, Inc. (Nov. 29, 2011).

Having just reached a settlement with the Commission in which the company is required to take several steps to make sure it lives up to its promises in the future, including giving consumers clear and prominent notice and obtaining consumers’ express consent before their information is shared beyond the privacy settings they have established, Facebook is changing the privacy settings of its users in a way that gives the company far greater ability to disclose their personal information than in the past.  With Timeline, Facebook has once again taken control over the user’s data from the user and has now made information that was essentially archived and inaccessible widely available without the consent of the user.

At the heart of EPIC’s concerns is Facebook’s approach to what some refer to as “privacy through obscurity” — the idea that a user’s information receives a degree of protection from the mere fact that it’s difficult to access.  According to ZDNet, Facebook denies that Timeline does not comply with the proposed settlement and maintains that “Timeline doesn’t change the privacy of any content,” to which an EPIC spokesperson responded in a statement:

And why do people now have to go through Timeline postings? Because Facebook posted stuff that most people assumed had vanished.  . . .   Facebook transitions are always like this. Each change is an opportunity for Facebook to nudge the settings toward greater disclosure. Privacy through obscurity has always been a key part of privacy safeguards with Facebook. That’s why users pushed so hard on the right to delete accounts. I know Facebook says that the information was previously posted but users knew it took a lot of work to really dig back through a user’s posts to find stuff that was no longer on the wall. It’s ridiculous for Facebook to say that there is no impact on privacy.

EPIC’s request likely will get a serious hearing from the FTC.  Indeed, the proposed FTC-Facebook settlement can be traced back to December 2009, when EPIC (joined by nine other organizations) filed a complaint with the FTC asserting that the revised privacy settings Facebook announced in July 2009 constituted “unfair and deceptive” business practices and urging the FTC to open an investigation and require Facebook to “restore its previous privacy settings” and “give Facebook users meaningful control over personal information provided by Facebook to advertisers and developers.”

In addition to its Dec. 27, 2011 letter regarding Timeline, EPIC also provided the FTC with its detailed Dec. 27, 2011 comments on the proposed settlement and urged the FTC to require Facebook to:

• Restore the privacy settings that users had in 2009, before the unfair and deceptive practices addressed by the Complaint began;
• Allow users to access all of the data that Facebook keeps about them;
• Cease creating facial recognition profiles without users’ affirmative consent;
• Make Facebook’s privacy audits publicly available to the greatest extent possible; [and]
• Cease secret post-log out tracking of users across web sites.

The public comment period on the proposed settlement closed Dec. 30, 2011.  To date the FTC has not responded publicly to EPIC’s Timeline charges, and has not yet given its final approval to the proposed settlement.