Facebook adds naggy “ask” button to profile pages

Disclosure of relationships, jobs now subject to easily clickable peer pressure.

Sam Machkovech – May 15, 2014 6:54 pm | 81

Thanks to Facebook's new "ask" function, friends can ask "what the dilly?" about relationship statuses, careers, high schools, and much more.

Up until recently, Facebook's mission to accumulate personal information for the sake of targeted advertising has operated in a mostly robotic manner. When users load their own personal pages, the social network has directly, politely asked them to add interests and likes in certain categories, and if any personal history portions are left blank, Facebook points those categories out while making automatic, historical guesses about things like jobs and education.

Apparently, automated nagging hasn't proven fruitful enough, because this week, Facebook has rolled out a new, crowd-sourced way to get to the heart of its users' lives: peer pressure. Now, when Facebook users peek at friends in their network on desktop Web browsers, they'll see an "ask" button on a profile's top-left "about" box when pertinent information has been left blank. (These "ask" buttons also appear when clicking through a user's profile on mobile browsers.)

Used to be, if users didn't disclose personal details like relationship status, hometown, current job, or high school, those blanks simply wouldn't appear in the prominent "about" box. Now, Facebook loudly advertises users' selective silence by way of the "ask" button. For example, if I click "ask" on a friend's "career" section, I'm shown a prompt that says "Let so-and-so know why you're asking for his/her work info," along with an optional text blank.

That friend receives a notification with a chance to answer the question, either with a text field (to fill out things like jobs and schools) or a list (for relationship status). Curiously, at that point, Facebook gives users the option to answer such an "ask" privately, as opposed to forcing public disclosure.

We have asked Facebook whether private answers will affect Facebook services like targeted advertising—if so, FB could be in hot, privacy-related waters yet again. We've also asked the company's reasons for giving users such a direct way to ask for hidden details. We'll update this post with any official response.

Update: A Facebook representative responded to say that this "ask" feature has been rolled out in waves to users since January, though when asked pointedly whether this was in the form of the obvious "ask" button that is now live across the site, or previously reported functionality buried in users' profiles, the representative was unable to clarify. Our additional questions about how "private" response data would be handled, and why Facebook made the change, remained unanswered.