If you’re one of those people who only log on to their facebook account on a weekly basis, you may want to visit your account at once if only to make sure your privacy settings are how you want them to be.
Facebook recently rolled out its revamped privacy settings to give more leeway to its 350 million users to control the content they share on the social networking site. The intention was quite noble, yet most users were appalled to find that the default settings rendered their profiles wide open for all the world to see – until they tinkered with their own privacy controls and fixed these, that is. The list of friends, personal information, and profile pictures were visible even to people not on one’s contact list.
The latter especially raised the hackles of many users who felt violated after Facebook exposed their profiles to the public. Kevin Bankston of the privacy watchdog Electronic Frontier Foundation has this to say about the updated Facebook privacy settings:
“These new “privacy” changes are clearly intended to push Facebook users to publicly share even more information than before. Even worse, the changes will actually reduce the amount of control that users have over some of their personal data. Not to say that many of the changes aren’t good for privacy. But other changes are bad, while a few are just plain ugly.”
Some users deactivated their accounts and took to the blogosphere to air their grievances. If you’re contemplating doing the same, reading Rafe Needleman’s post at CNET on how to manage your Facebook privacy settings may change your mind.
That Facebook’s new privacy platform should leave many users mighty annoyed is quite ironic to think that the changes were implemented in response to public clamor and the findings by Canada’s Privacy Commissioner that the old privacy settings were confusing.
A few hours after the rollout, I logged on to my account and was greeted by Facebook’s Privacy Announcement:
“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.”
Out of curiosity, I decided to look up certain people I know who are not on my contact list just to see how their accounts would appear to an outsider like me. I was shocked to find everything visible, the status update they had posted a few hours ago, friends’ posts on their wall, their personal information, friends’ list, and all the photos they put under the “Profile” album. Of course, they could change the privacy controls as soon as they log on to their account, but until then the default settings will remain in effect.
Nevertheless, the ability to control who gets to see one’s posts and comment on them is certainly a welcome development. I only wish it happened a week sooner so I wouldn’t have had to go through the trouble of creating another account and adding only select friends while I slowly weaned myself from the existing one which was full of strangers. The only reason I had added them was the fact that we both played the same game on Facebook. With the new settings in place, however, I will be deactivating the new account.
Let’s face it, one of the reasons we like Facebook is that we get to rant about almost anything under the sun, be it a nosy neighbor, corrupt politicians, a boring job, a treacherous friend, a nasty ex. Still, there are certain posts we only want visible to certain people and hands off to some.
Privacy has become a major concern among online users especially in the midst of reports about identity theft growing rampant on social networking sites. But that’s the problem: Can privacy and social networks truly co-exist? We can tinker with the settings all we want to gain some semblance of privacy, but that’s just it. Who is to say that such information will remain out of the public eye once the site’s privacy policy is revamped anew?
Online privacy is a myth. Whatever we put out there on cyberspace can somehow be traced back to us. Perhaps what this incident should teach us is to be careful about everything we share online, particularly on seemingly harmless social networking sites, lest it comes back to haunt us someday.
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