Does the new Facebook privacy settings allow your personal information to be compromised?
Although sold as a "privacy" revamp, Facebook's new changes are obviously intended to get people to open up even more of their Facebook data to the public. The privacy "transition tool" that guides users through the configuration will "recommend" — preselect by default — the setting to share the content they post to Facebook, such as status messages and wall posts, with everyone on the Internet, even though the default privacy level that those users had accepted previously was limited to "Your Networks and Friends" on Facebook (for more details, we highly recommend the Facebook privacy resource page and blog post from our friends at the ACLU, carefully comparing the old settings to the new settings). As the folks at TechCrunch explained last week before the changes debuted:
The way Facebook makes its recommendations will have a huge impact on the site's future. Right now, most people don't share their content using the 'everyone' option that Facebook introduced last summer. If Facebook pushes users to start using that, it could have a better stream of content to go against Twitter in the real-time search race. But Facebook has something to lose by promoting ‘everyone' updates: given the long-standing private nature of Facebook, they could lead to a massive privacy fiasco as users inadvertently share more than they mean to.
At this point there's no "if" about it: the Facebook privacy transition tool is clearly designed to push users to share much more of their Facebook info with everyone, a worrisome development that will likely cause a major shift in privacy level for most of Facebook's users, whether intentionally or inadvertently. As Valleywag rightly warns in its story "Facebook's New ‘Privacy' Scheme Smells Like an Anti-Privacy Plot"
Facebook users say the site's new privacy settings are "materially deceptive, confusing and ineffective" at guarding personal information from prying eyes. The federal class action claims that since November 2009 the new settings have provided less control over personal information, exposing their Facebook friends, pictures, organizations they support and products they use to snooping by virtually anyone, "including hackers, scammers, criminals, sociopaths and the like."
The complaint quotes "Internet expert" Jason Calacanis as saying, "Yes, Facebook is tricking us into exposing all our items so that those personal items get indexed in search engines - including Facebook's - in order to drive more traffic to Facebook."
Links:
http://www.courthousenews.com/2010/02/16/FacebookCA.pdf
http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2009/12/facebooks-new-privacy-changes-good-bad-and-ugly