Facebook has always banked its reputation on the fact that it is a private and seemingly secure way to network and connect with friends, family, and other colleagues. Most people come to Facebook believing that the information provided in their account is private and accessible only to those that they have on their list of friends. In truth this is not the case, and a recent change in Facebook's privacy policy may be opening up even more of an individuals private information to the world, making your personal data easily searched through Google or other search engines. Sadly this is not the first time that Facebook has been criticized for privacy concerns, but to this point it certainly seems to be the worst one.
New Facebook Privacy Policy Causes Private Records To Potentially Become Public
Beginning in mid December 2009 Facebook users were asked to review and accept a new privacy policy when they logged in to the web site. Since most people instictively just click through these kinds of pages until they reach the content they were looking for the odds are very good that most people approved the policy without even reading it. Had they read it they would have realized that Facebook was essentially asking users to allow them to begin publishing almost all of their private data including posts, photos, and other information to the major search engines. Essentially it was removing the walled garden of privacy that Facebook had always built itself on, unless you specifically told it not to. The end result of the change is that if a user had never adjusted his or her privacy settings before while logged into Facebook then approving the new policy would set all of those settings to be publicly accessible. Phone numbers, email addresses, and almost all of the information that was up to that point private would now be public.
Bloggers and Media Icons Blast Facebook For Bad Decisions Regarding Privacy
The move caused a furor among those in the media that actually take the time to analyze these privacy policy changes, and thanks to bloggers such as Jason Calacanis the realization of what Facebook had actually done was finally brought to light of the general public. More in depth discussions of the changes and what they really mean for people have also been brought up on major Internet podcasts such as This Week In Tech (episode #225). These sources are highly recommended for those interested in a more focused explanation of the changes and their potential for causing harm to user's confidence in the site.
The moral of the story is that if you have logged into Facebook over the last month be sure to go in to your privacy settings and make sure that all of the information that you want to be private is still private. Failing to do so could leave you and your family secrets exposed to the entire world.
