Facebook, the fastest growing Internet company of all time, made a significant change to the operation of the site last week. The new default settings for user privacy greatly diminishes user privacy, providing a wide range of benefits – for Facebook and its advertisers!
Last week when users of Facebook logged in, they were treated to a popup that explained “we’re making some changes to give you more control.”
Misleading and Unethical
Unfortunately for users, the promise of giving users more control is misleading and worse the implementation of the new controls is unethical.
Most users will have clicked through the invitation to choose privacy setting details without a second thought, trusting that Facebook would keep user default settings at the status quo – permitting sharing of personal information with Friends.
Wrong!
New Facebook Privacy Settings
Facebook users are familiar with two layers of privacy: Allowing for full or restricted access to profile posts on a friend by friend basis.
Facebook settings now have four layers of sharing across a wide variety of settings:
- share with friends (Until last week, this setting was the highest level of exposure to user posts)
- customized settings (allows for limiting access only to specific users or restricting access to information on a friend by friend basis.)
- share with friends of friends (allowing an extended circle of contacts who are not your friends to see your posts)
- share with everyone (giving access to your content to anyone and everyone!)
Ethically, the new terms of service for Facebook should use the current “share with friends” setting as the default. Instead, the default setting for users who thoughtlessly click through the new pop-up is to share all your private information, including comments on posts, friends, groups, photos, status updates far beyond your network of friends and in some cases to Share with Everyone in the world!
In short, the default settings are the LOWEST PRIVACY settings possible, drastically changing your Facebook terms.
Even the seemingly safer setting Share with Friends of Friends makes user data significantly less private. For example: If I have 200 friends I’m sharing information with now and they each have 200 friends, my content will now be shared with 40 000 people instead of 200 (39 800 of whom I likely don’t know). This is what Facebook calls more control of privacy?
Um, excuse me, isn’t the magic of Facebook that users personal posts, photos, stories and ideas are being shared privately within their network of friends?
Facebook is taking the cultural norm of accepting online Terms of Service as a formality (blindly clicking accept), as an opportunity to open user content to advertisers and search engines greatly increasing the value of user data to Facebook.
More control means more confusion
Users who choose to review their privacy settings in Facebook are faced with a dizzying array of choices to make, being forcing to choose one of the four settings across over a dozen aspects of their Facebook profile and content. Most users will not take the time to think about and choose to change these settings now or in the future.
Why Confuse and Trick Users?
It would have been nice to leave the default for all settings to share with friends, but the lure of integrating Facebook data into Search Engine results (Facebook’s own, Google, and Bing) and driving more page views, creating more inventory for advertisers is too much for Facebook to pass up. The new default terms of use also make the Facebook user community more like Twitter – which from the beginning has been wide open, publicly sharing user updates with everyone.
Changing Default Terms: Not Best Practice
Facebook not only recommends new user settings but forces users to deselect these suggestions and click the Old Settings to maintain their current level of privacy (a step I immediately took!)
When the largest and fastest growing Internet company in history, behaves so unethically, it opens the door to other Web services to be just as sneaky.
The experience with Facebook means I for one, will be spending a lot more time reviewing terms of service in the future.
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After “giving users more control” and therein killing privacy,
Mark Zuckerberg amusingly had some rather personal content widely distributed online as a result of using the new Facebook recommended (default) settings for privacy. http://bit.ly/7fW8Wt
Shortly thereafter, Zuckerberg put stricter limits on his own Facebook privacy settings which begs the question:
If Zuckerberg finds Facebook recommended security settings (default settings) too much to take why should users be told to share with the world?
I have received the following message when I log into Facebook and now I cannot get past it it is frozen:
We're making some changes to give you more control of your information and help you stay connected. We've simplified the Privacy page and added the ability to set privacy on everything you share, from status updates to photos.
At the same time, we're helping everyone find and connect with each other by keeping some information—like your name and profile picture—publicly available.
The next step will guide you through choosing your privacy settings. You can learn more about how privacy works here.
i can not enter facebook i am blokked
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