Facebook & Privacy

Link

The article I have linked above is called "Why Facebook's Privacy War is Not Over," written by Pete Cashmore of Mashable.

My mother has always insisted that I never put my full name or any other personal information anywhere on the internet, for fear of identity theft and other related scenarios. Therefore, I've always been concerned with privacy online.

I don't consider myself an avid Facebook user, but I've had to increase my participation because my group's research concerns Facebook and relationships. Because of our research I've become interested in privacy within Facebook since it has a steady gain of membership; it has over 400 million active users with 70% of users coming from outside the United States (source). To place an even bigger emphasis: it's unusual to find people that don't have a Facebook account. Privacy issues range from local Facebook stalking (through features like wall-to-wall and news feed) to global issues such as selling user information to companies for marketing purposes and more.

I always assumed that people were merely making a fuss about privacy issues- if you don't want your information out there, then don't make it public. For example, you can make your Facebook profile entirely private. Recent changes and ongoing developments within Facebook, however, are consistently pushing to make all information public. A few weeks ago Facebook changed their "Likes and Interests" sections so that your details were either public or deleted from your profile. The article talks about this and another update that "introduced 'Instant Personalization' which shares public information with third party sites" (I encountered this when I was on Yelp and at the bottom of the page, it told me "7 of your friends are using Yelp. Join now! - something to that effect). Both of these features have the option of opting out through changing privacy settings, but these features are on by default.

 Mark Zuckerburg, founder of Facebook, said that "if people share more, the world will become more open and connected." There is no doubt that the world has definitely become more open and connected. There are many benefits and advantages to making details and personal information public. However, there are also many disadvantages; there seems to be an unavoidable increasing threat against personal privacy. It makes one wonder if there will ever be a time when you don't have the choice of opting out- and that the only way to avoid your information being public is by not joining the social networking website. But doing so might make people think you're a hermit or something, right? Or, people would just never know who you are.