Facebook has come under some pressure from consumer groups in recent months over it’s privacy policies, and has had to make some significant changes to it’s terms and conditions in response to pressure from it’s own users.
Now after further criticism, this time from the US Senate, European Union and civil liberty groups, the popular social-networking website is seriously considering simplifying it’s users privacy settings further.
At the end of 2009 a change to the privacy settings made everybody’s personal information available to search engines unless they changed those settings to pevent it. This was widely seen as the company playing “fast and loose” with it’s customers privacy, and it’s responsibilities with data protection.
The move resulted in an angry letter from the EU calling the move “unacceptable”, and resulted in many users quitting the site.
In recent days there have been high-level meetings at the company to dicuss users’ privacy going forward. A spokewoman from Facebook has said “We’re working on responding to these concerns”, adding simply “watch this space.”
The website’s current privacy policy has 50 seperate settings, 170 options and totals 5,830 words. This makes it longer than the US constitution.
Source : BBC
Update: Facebook has modified and simplified their privacy settings significantly recently. When you access the new privacy settings on the Facebook social networking site you can select between two different privacy profiles and a custom profile.
The custom setting allows you to define the users or groups that you want to share information with. This is divided into the five groups
- How You Connect – Control how you connect with people you know.
- How Tags Work – Control what happens when friends tag you or your content.
- Apps and Websites – Control what gets shared with apps, games and websites.
- Limit the Audience for Past Posts – Limit the audience for posts you shared with friends of friends or Public
- Blocked People and Apps – Manage the people and apps you’ve blocked.
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A Brief Guide on Privacy Settings for Facebook
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Well, time for me to DELETE my account there… not ‘deactivate’. I’ve changed over to folkdirect.com which so far is going well and lots more open privacy controls there. As word spreads the community will get bigger and bigger. All good. Worth a try.
I both deleted all info and deactivated some time ago. Mainly because of privacy considerations, but as much because – after using FaceBook for 6 months (pressure from friends and family) – I never could quite see what use it was. Even with the Hide button freely used, pages of inconsequential rubbish every day. I don’t miss it.
I know people who spend half their lives in FaceBook – if you can call that living. I have better things to do with my life, including having a good laugh whenever I hear people ask incredulously “How can you manage without a FaceBook account?” Very easily as it happens.
http://joindiaspora.com/ is facebook with privacy period.