New Facebook Messenger “Seen by X” indicator : Confidence vs. Privacy ?
Interesting the new Facebook move in favour of displaying whether or not you’ve seen the incoming message wihtin Facebook Messenger… Facebook Messenger is following Blackberry Messenger, BBM, in the disclosure of personal information with its well-known indicator “Message has been read”. I remind you that BBM is displaying 3 status : “Sent” (from app) , “Delivered” (to app) and “Read” (by the app… thus the user).
Remember the “old time” of Instant Messaging – I wouldn’t say this because I’m still using and selling it – we were talking about “Available”, “Not available”, “Away”, “Do not disturb”. After using these online status presence, we asked all IM users to type by themselves their own custom status message and ended up by proposing to hide this status presence and status message. Why ? Simple because, by selecting theses statuses, I was revealing some privacy info and moreover I was spending too much time to parameter an info that ended not to be really crucial to my receivers. That was the end of the use of online status presence and status message in favour of hidding everything… Too long, too complex!
Today the sole important information that needs to be disclosed to the receiver(s) is “Sent and Delievred”. The rest belongs to the category of personal info I do not really want to disclose. At ProcessOne, we’ve developed another way of showing indicators within our messaging over IP service, TextOne : only when a message is not delivered or a message delivery has not been confirmed, the mobile app shows a red or blue icon respectively.
Amazing no that the VentureBeat is writing “Sure, you may sacrifice a little privacy in favor of better conversations, but the exchanges are with people you presumably like, so maybe more information is better”. Guess what I’m messaging with other people than my close friends, my family… I’m messaging with my clients even sometimes my prospects (that would like to test our TextOne messaging service). So I really don’t want to share that I read or even seen his/her message… but it’s not the case with my peers and friends but not Facebook friends (some of them I do not even know who they are!).
Like other privacy settings, location for instance, you would be able to customize this “Seen by X” in Facebook Messenger. Otherwise, you would chat with a bunch of people known or not, and without knowing it, you would be disclosing some kind of interest by revealing that you’re reading and seeing messages.
What do you think ? What is your standpoint on this privacy-disclosing feature ?