Facebook’s Privacy Settings Still Inadequate?
June 21st, 2010 by adminFacebook’s Privacy Settings Still Inadequate
Since the social networking website Facebook altered its privacy settings it has been hard pressed to find a set of settings that keeps the critics at bay. It has even been said that Facebooks recent privacy policy changes are a lesson in how not to control user’s privacy.
Two months ago today Facebook released detail at a conference to enable users to share more of their personal information. However, instead the result of these changes were to users privacy settings as users personal information was available to the world online. Instead, users had to opt out as they were automatically opted in to share their sensitive information with anybody. Such information accessible under the amended privacy settings included name, date of birth, address and more.
The fundamental issue was that the social networking site did not request the permission of the users to release such sensitive information and so many users were left open to their sensitive information being misused due to the availability of it across the world wide web, viewable by all.
The new privacy settings were seen as a step backward from the previous settings that had been in place on the site. Although Facebook quickly extended the scope of the privacy settings, these were deemed too complex for the majority of users to fully understand and so many users were unable to make an informed decision based on the complexity of the settings. Further to this, many users were unaware of the privacy policy changes as there was insufficient notice on the site to users.
The criticism Facebook has faced has been due Facebook seemingly choosing for users, rather than allowing the individual to choose how much information they wish to share with outsiders.
Critics have held onto this because Facebook’s original standpoint was based on a private social network whereby users could choose to share information with friends only if they desired.
Transparency in society is a relatively new concept being undertaken by many websites and is popular among business and government enterprises. However, it is feared that this trend for social transparency will create an open book for social network users whose personal information becomes used for behavioural advertising, general spam or even identity theft.
Unlike Twitter which openly functions to share your thoughts with the world, Facebook was not founded on that premise and many users are struggling to understand the new direction the social networking site is attempting to enter into. Due to complaints made by its users, Facebook amended its privacy settings yet again and simplified the privacy settings to assist users in understanding how they can control their privacy on the site.
The golden rule would seem to be to not make automatic changes without first sending a generic notification to all users and create a download free privacy policy. To appease users, a site with this level of functionality ought to have set the privacy settings to be private, and then to direct users to alter their settings to the degree of transparency they wished to have with the public.
