Okay, can I just rant here for a second about the never-ending drumbeat of Facebook and its goose-stepping march towards the Island of Absolutely No Privacy? I mean, after weeks of being beaten up by the industry and users alike about it pushing people towards having more and more information publicly accessible on a site that started out incredibly private and closed (heck, if you weren’t in one of the selected colleges, you couldn’t even join!).
Now they’ve introduced their new privacy settings and have a “Recommended” option. But check it out…
First, here’s my default privacy setting with the new fancy grid display:
I’m pretty public, but you can see that on Facebook I really like to limit my information to friends or friends-of-friends, rather than everyone. The only info I share with the world at large — the 500 million Facebook users — is my bio and favorite quotations.
Click on “Recommended”, however, and check out what it suggests:
Yup, Facebook believes that “privacy” = “share most everything with everyone on the service”, including all your status updates, photos, and even notes that you leave (which for many people means their blog posts, with the RSS feed tracked by Facebook). Really?
if you want recommended settings, choose Friends of Friends instead, at least:
That’s a bit better, though with the multiplication of the social graph your 500 friends could mean that 25,000 people are seeing your status updates, etc., which might not be what you want either.
Oh, and while you’re at it, find and check this area out too:
And Mark Zuckerberg and the rest of teh Facebook team, can you please just encourage people towards more privacy rather than less? That’s kinda what we’re upset about, after all…
Really nice article about Facebook privacy settings. I personally believe in keeping my Facebook profile public. But you made a good point there, I don’t want give my personal information on a website, like my birthday or anything.
In the age of facebook privacy issues, the sundance acclaimed documentary ‘Catfish’ asks a lot of important questions: http://bit.ly/anE6RZ
Dave – I couldn’t agrre more. Facebook should be pelted with rotten fruit and fetid rodent carcasses in the most public way possible for this outrage. Legions of young people (my daughter included) are being encouraged to expose personal details for the benefit of those with questionable motives. My daughter recently had her passport ripped off and now together with her “recommended” personal details being splashed all over the internet the thieves can finish the job and steal her identity wholesale, not to mention now having a significantly better chance of hacking her bank account. I am blazing!!! I suspect that cash is behind this… I mean, are Facebook being given a massive bung by advertisers, encouraging them to junk any last vestiges of morality they might have? I can see such advertisers now,rubbing their hands with venal glee at being given access to half a planet’s worth of highly lucrative demographic data. The whole thing has the bad smell of faceless corporations; inhuman, uncontrollable parasitic systems labouring to turn human beings into bloodless economic units….