Lately many websites and online news sources tend to stress the issues of privacy on facebook and many are not happy about Facebook's privacys settings. There is a lot of talk over facebook's association with third-party companies and whether or not facebook shares its information with advertisers. Facebook claims that users are in control of the privacy of their own account and privacy settings can be changed on a person's personal account. A canadian privacy group however, asserts that in Canada a great percentage of people who use facebook at between 14 and 25 year olds and many students who fall towards the left of that category may not know how to change the settings (source: BBC News: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/7428833.stm.
Some sites have gone far enough to petition a quit facebook day and seem to recommend leaving facebook until these matters of privacy are fixed. http://www.quitfacebookday.com/ calls for all facebook users to quit facebook on May 31, 2010 and http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/05/18/facebook-alternatives-lis_n_580486.html provides alternative social networking sites people could use instead of facebook. I honestly think that things like quit facebook day will not succeed because too many people are too dependent on facebook or do not worry much about the privacy I know for me switiching to another social networking site would be a waste of time because like many people, most of the people I communicate or keep in touch with are on facebook so if I switiched sites I would not have many people to talk to or keep in touch with. Overall I think facebook is very popular with its users and is a very large company so I am not surprised to find that facebook has not changed or budged with its new privacy settings. Does anyone have any other opinions regarding the issue of privacy on facebook?
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
However, I think if other social networking sites adapted to this current wave of anti-facebook press and hype, and made it so that you could only 'import pictures, information and friends' from facebook (the friends who are not currently on that site would be put on a kind of 'waiting list' who would then be added once they joined) it would considerably ease the transition and might actually help to facilitate a significant exodus from Facebook.
ReplyDelete