Facebook rolls out privacy settings intended to make us all go public
Facebook has now rolled out its new privacy control settings, almost six months after it was made clear changes were coming. The company has dressed the new effort up as if it’s being done for the users, enabling them a greater degree of control over what is kept private. But let’s ignore the spin and be honest with each other – this is an effort to persuade us all to make our profiles, updates, photos, and personal information public.
It’s often easy to forget, as we use Facebook on a daily basis to keep in touch with friends and communicate with family, that this is a company, a business, a going concern. Although it has been built as a living, breathing community, the prime goal for Facebook is to grow, be successful and make money.
Until now the privacy control settings on Facebook have been a little confusing but aimed at allowing those of us who don’t want our information seen and shared around the Internet to be able to manage that goal. Now, things are a little different.
Facebook put out a press release on Dec. 9 announcing new privacy tools. The release has pronouncements such as, “setting a new standard in user control,” and, “tools to empower people to personalize control over their information.” But this is merely spin for a bigger, more sinister reality.
The problem is that Facebook wants, even needs, as many of its 350 million users to open their profiles and updates up to enable the site to grow and expand. While we all remain private and limiting the sharing of information to our nearest and dearest Facebook doesn’t have the opportunity to do things with all that data that could help it make some much-needed revenue.
The key thing here is that you shouldn’t either ignore the privacy notice that pops up next time you log in to Facebook, or allow Facebook to control the flow of information leaking from your profile. Instead, go through each section and actually choose for yourself what you want to be kept private and what you don’t mind being made public.
If you choose not to follow that advice then any data you input into Facebook could be searched for by all and sundry on the site and even find a wider audience on the Google and Bing search engines. And no amount of spin from Mark Zuckerberg and co. should persuade you otherwise.
Check out these posts at ReadWriteWeb and EFF for more information.
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