So some Facebook users were upset at Facebook’s announced privacy policies. (Facebook is, you will recall, the massively popular online social service that allows you to easily stalk your high school girlfriend) So Facebook launched a new privacy policy today, which you know if you logged in and was immediately confronted by a new pop-up demand for clarification of what you wanted seen by whom. Now you can get much more specific on which elements of your Facebook experience can be seen by only your friends, which bits can be seen by friends of your friends, which chunks are visible to your friends and networks, and what gets hung out for the whole frickin’ world to see. And yet people are still complaining!
The transition screen recommends you set your privacy settings to “Everyone” and helpfully preselected that for you in every instance, no matter what your previous settings were. You can, of course, select your old settings again and go about your merry, but many users won’t bother or won’t understand and will unknowingly leave themselves open to identity theft and other nasty things as their personal info gets spread across the land.
Well, yeah.
That was almost certainly Facebook’s hope. They want more stuff to be open to all searchers. The more easily findable content there is, the more valuable Facebook is to advertisers. And your Wall comments going public means they can take on Twitter in the highly competitive unprofitable-online-chattering field. They want money, they do, and are in the business of procuring more of it. Granted, it’s a bit cheesy to default everyone to the most open and unprivate settings possible — better to leave everyone’s settings as they were and then let people open up if they wish — but if FBers don’t read the rules they can’t really complain when they lose the game.
What does bug me (and the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the ACLU) about the new policies are a) some of my profile info is now public whether I want it to be or not, and b) applications can access my info, even if I’m not using them (as long as one of my friends is) and spread it about.
The first might seem harmless. Your name will be out there, can’t help that, but what’s ther problem with your friend list or your fan pages? Turns out you can tell an awful lot about a person by the people they friend, and while I don’t join anything I’d be ashamed of, for many people having your boss notice you’re a member of, say, Closeted Gay and Heavily Armed Time Bombs With Bigoted Employers could cause problems in the break room.
And applications being able to access and distribute my data without my OK just makes men hate those endless quizzes and repetitive points games even more, which I would have bet was impossible if in so doing it wouldn’t immediately add the bet to my status.
So the very first thing I did, after clicking Old Settings for everything, was to hit Settings > Privacy Settings and go over them with a fine-tooth mouse. Then I went into my profile and did the only thing I could to prevent some data from getting scooped by unscrupulous scammers looking for identity theft info: I removed it. If Facebook won’t let me hide info, Facebook doesn’t get to look at it either.
The only real answer when it comes to guarding sensitive information online is to not put sensitive information online. It would be nice if companies would actually safeguard it for you but when it comes down to the nitty-gritty they are companies, and they are not there for you.
Here’s a quick rundown of what the new privacy settings mean:
I chose to reduce my involvement at facebook to an utter minimum. I think we all get that everyone’s “stuff” is out there, somewhere, for scraping, collecting, etc etc etc… but facebook is a whole new game… I dont like what MZ is doing from time to time and so I have a friend list that is currently only 8 people long (down from a hundred or so a couple of years ago). I’ve also used an android prog called exfoliate to get rid of most of my posts (cant help stuff posted on walls of people I have unfriended already)…
I understand that MZ needs to make money to keep maintaining facebook as a free service, but be damned if my personal stuff is going to be available to the fb demon. At least, not if I can help it. I’ve no doubt a new anti-privacy glitch will be introduced to the fb system at some time, but by then I will likely be gone. I actually had three accounts on fb. In retrospect, I kept the wrong one… the one which is really me. I shan’t make a new one though, unless I get to hankering after the games. Which at this point seems highly unlikely. I’d like to keep fish wrangling but basically I’ve had it with fb, entirely.
Enter Google Plus