Resistance is futile when electrons are excited
|
|
|
Facebook users reacted to privacy changes
SOCIAL NOTWORKING WEBSITE Facebook changed its privacy settings recently - we won't speculate about what goes on behind its beaded curtains - prompting many of its users to lock down their personal data security profiles. Now we know about how many.
Facebook made the change in December and anyone who's on Facebook and ever gets email messages forwarded to them will have received warnings from their friends that unless they did something about it all their holiday photos and witty status updates would be visible to everybody. Facebook itself advised its users to change their privacy settings, though perhaps in a more low-key manner than its critics.
In a blog post at the time, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg wrote, "We've worked hard to build controls that we think will be better for you, but we also understand that everyone's needs are different. We'll suggest settings for you based on your current level of privacy, but the best way for you to find the right settings is to read through all your options and customize them for yourself. I encourage you to do this and consider who you're sharing with online."
According to a report in the BayNewser, the firm revisited those dark days and admitted that only a third of its users did just as they were encouraged to do.
According to Tim Sparapani, Facebook's director of public policy, most of the time users don't change their privacy settings. He explained that barely ten percent of Facebookers draw themselves away from telling people what shoes they have on and what they're having for lunch to alter their privacy settings, and argued that the fact that many of them had done so proved that they weren't all dunderheads. Though not in so many words.
"Almost 35 percent of our users actually customised their settings. They took control of their data, perhaps for the first time. 35 per cent of 350 million users is an extraordinary number. We're pretty psyched about it," said Sparapani at a roundtable called Exploring Privacy that was held by the Federal Trade Commission.
As we mentioned, we would rather not speculate on the privacy implications of using Facebook, but we'll be really 'psyched' too when 100 per cent of its users have updated their personal profile settings. µ
Share this:
Share
Facebook can only f*** up so many times before they become the next Friendster.
Check or Research "Total Information Awareness" Program to seee what Facebook and all other social networking sites are really about. And why they try to share a common database API.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Total_information_awareness
Many accounts on facebook are unused or abandoned anyway. Why would anyone care about a blank account? Majority of unchanged privacy settings are probably just dead accounts kept to keep the number of members high.
http://theinfamouscanadian.blogspot.com/2010/01/pull-your-heads-out.html
Well I was completely shocked at this latest privacy change, infact so much so I specifically removed ALL images apart from 1 profile picture from my facebook page.
Although privacy controls have come in I still feel them completely irrelevant if facebook development is going to turn around and remove all of these privacy settings a year down the line where my personal images which I share with my friends are then exposed to the world once again.
Unacceptable, it should have been made crystal clear to ALL facebook users well in advance of what was happening.
I still utilize the social networking capabilities of the site in a more limited fashion.
Simple, they should have put everyones account on lockdown before they implemented the changes.
One thing I love about facebook is the fact that i can have an empty profile that says nothing about me and still see everything about almost everyone I know, without even becoming Facebook Friends with them :P
If anyone has his photos unshared, just check their friends wall, u can read the comments and then get to see their pics :P
I see people are worried about Google toolbar and browsing privacy.
Facebook has marketing profiles that Google could only dream of. People forget so easily the Cliche "You don't get something for nothing." except for Facebook, and a few others. Facebook makes a whole wad of money selling your profile in a nice neat package, to third parties, including Google. Nobody in Facebook has caught on. Not only has Facebook a profile on you, but if you got caught up in the family tree bullshit, they now own all the information on you your brothers and sisters ,uncle, grandparents and all the other information you so gladly give away freely.I guess you don't think your life is worth much but the companies do.
So if you are on Facebook, I don't want you to ever scream about the invasion of your privacy. You voluntarily gave it all away when you signed up to Facebook. Remember they own everything you have given them, read the EULA,and they can sell that info to any third party.
I decided to dump Facebook after this last privacy change. Wondering how many others made this decision.
Most complicated privacy settings I've ever seen. Also buggy; people have complianed that they get mail about comments I've made but can't see them. Bad app integration; good luck setting privacy on what Mafiawars is sharing, or using the privacy settings for apps - they don't seem to work right. Sigh.