On visiting facebook last night, I was met with this:
Not a good thing. Basically, the new privacy settings default your profile views to everyone. Including the boss whose friend request you haven’t responded to in over a year now. And pervy male stalkers crawling the net like search engines. Prospective employers too; they’re in the habit of Googling interviewees these days. The only information Facebook is suggesting you keep to your circle of friends is your email address, phone number and physical address.
I don’t go to my Facebook everyday so I went around the blogs checking when these new privacy (clearly the opposite) features were rolled out. Apparently this happened around the 9th of this month and tech blogs say this is some kind of reconfiguring Facebook to make it more twitter-like.
Some time last year I complained about how strangers could search for a Facebook account and together with a full name, get your picture and what you’re a fan of. And there was no saying “No” to this hardwired setting. Now, instead of correcting these issues Facebook is pushing more and more to rid the social networking site of privacy; make facebook one giant social network where everyone is everyone’s friend. Sadly, real social life is quite the opposite, people like keeping stuff to themselves and their few trusted friends.
As I clicked ‘no thanks’ to Facebook’s publish-to-everyone suggestions, I couldn’t help wonder how much more this will complicate the phishing problem.
But wait a minute, at the bottom of that screen there is a small declaration by Facebook:
“When you visit a Facebook-enhanced application, it will be able to access your publicly available information, which includes Name, Profile Photo, Gender, Current City, Networks, Friend List, and Pages. This information is considered visible to Everyone.“
Now that’s worrying. Of course for business Facebook pages, it’s a different story altogether; more exposure by default is great for visibility.
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