Facebook added the proverbial last straw with its latest privacy faux pas. It has demonstrated, yet again, that in pursuing it’s goal of selling advertising, Facebook places very little importance on our personal privacy. Remember that, while Facebook ostensibly is a web site designed to help people connect with like-minded people, in fact Facebook is a business which derives it’s revenues from other businesses, not from it’s subscribers. In plain English: Unless you are paying big dollars to Facebook, you are not Facebook’s primary audience.
Don’t believe me? I just spent half an hour tightening up my Facebook privacy settings; it was a bewildering maze of pages and checkboxes and pop-up windows. I thought maybe I was just dim, that it couldn’t be as hard as it seemed to be. But no; it really is that hard. The New York Times counted the words and discovered that Facebook’s privacy policy is longer than the US constitution!
The new opt-out settings certainly are complex. Facebook users who hope to make their personal information private should be prepared to spend a lot of time pressing a lot of buttons. To opt out of full disclosure of most information, it is necessary to click through more than 50 privacy buttons, which then require choosing among a total of more than 170 options.
Users must decide if they want only friends, friends of friends, everyone on Facebook, or a customized list of people to see things like their birthdays or their most recent photos. To keep information as private as possible, users must select “only friends” or “only me” from the pull-down options for all the choices in the privacy settings, and must uncheck boxes that say information will be shared across the Web.
The last straw was discovering a page which allowed my personal information to be shared with third-parties (advertisers and other businesses) when my friends do stuff, not because of my own actions. Here is the page, after I turned everything off; all of the boxes had been checked when I first came to the page.
Just one example: I am perfectly happy allowing my friends to know my birthday but I was angry to discover that, when a friend of mine “visits a Facebook Platform application or website,” my birthday was revealed to the business running that “application or website.” That’s just not right; I did not give my permission for this. I do not want it to happen. Facebook added this “feature” and began giving out this information without asking me.
In response to that discovery, I have done a couple of things. First, I took the time to go through every Facebook privacy page and tighten up the settings. My friends can still see stuff about me. The friends of my friends can also see some stuff about me. To the extent possible, I have blocked business’ abilities to obtain my data. Second, I have removed all of the data which I do not want publicly shared. Since I cannot trust Facebook to keep it private, I no longer store those data in my Facebook profile.
If you are reading this on Facebook, you should know that Facebook is posting a copy of my original article. I actually wrote this on my own blog at www.CheerfulCurmudgeon.com and I invite you to visit the site directly. Facebook does not copy everything from the blog and you are missing good stuff by staying in Facebook and not coming over to the actual website.
I choose to control access to my data, sharing it only with the people that I trust. Facebook has proven, time and again, to be a very untrustworthy arbiter of our data.
