Posted by
Chris Campbell
at
Thursday, December 10, 2009
Whenever Facebook launches a redesign or alters anything, someone starts one of those moronic "1,000,000,000,000 people against (insert whatever)" and fools far and wide join up. It's boredom, I guess. Amazingly, given Facebook's recent privacy overhaul, I've yet to see any group related to this ridiculous play on their users. Most probably think that they're given more flexibility with respect to privacy, and it appears as if they actually are. However, if you take one quick look at the default settings that you can just opt-in to and move on (which most will certainly do), you are sharing with "Everyone." If I'm not mistaken, that means "Everyone," whether they're a friend or not. So an ex-girlfriend or that kid you used to scuffle with on the playground, although not your friend, can now see all of your information. This is a very slippery move by Facebook. Very.
I really only use Facebook to post links back to this grating blog of mine. I've deleted most photos recently and I'll now try and clean it up completely. I am connected to many folks throughout my personal and professional life so I will keep the account active so not to lose contact info., as many now appear to be using the site as their main contact page. And well, Joyce Linehan's Pernice updates are too hilarious to walk away from. However, I will now severely limit activity, if not just stop altogether. I am far from a private person in just about every element of my life, but when an organization tries to dupe me and/or its users, I can't play anymore.
If I have any of this wrong, let me know.
My blog: www.ccsbandwagon.com
My e-mail: campbellcj at gmail dot com
1 comments:
If I wanted to be on MySpace and put my profile out there to trawl for strangers, I'd be there. If I wanted to be on Twitter sharing my 140 characters with the world, I'd be there. I am on Facebook because it is "private" - you have to be part of FB to access it and within that users have control over who has access to what. It meant that the people I interact with are by and large people I actually know and that made the use of FB all the more valuable.
In addition to that, FB was the default destination page. By becoming a fan of various pages, I didn't need to go to loads of websites to keep on top of interests, FB was my news reader, both of friends and general interest.
FB had sites coming to FB, integrating with FB, and that meant FB got and retained the traffic, not the other way around.
If these changes mean that FB content is now going to be accessible all over the web - I can use my Google reader to keep up with friend's statuses, or my FB news feed, I can go to Twitpic and see FB photos (or whatever development that will come out of the free access for EVERYONE that FB now desires), this all means instead of staying within FB, users will be leaving it. There'll be no point in clicking into FB when you can find the content that interests you elsewhere, and you don't have to sacrifice your privacy to access it.
With these changes and whatever other anticipated ones FB is going to roll out, this means that users give up their privacy in order to put more of their private data onto the web so there's no point in continuing to use a site that is no longer private when you can access the information you wanted from the site elsewhere - search engines, caches, and not even being logged into FB yet being able to see people's profiles.
In other words, I agree with you. This move by FB is madness and destroying the very thing that makes FB work.
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