Facebook Privacy Issues Still Linger
Are you addicted to Facebook? A lot of people are. Many spend hours each day to update their status and interact with other users on Facebook. Facebook is a great tool for businesses as well, giving them the chance to connect with prospects and build solid outposts to increase their sales and conversions. Facebook may be a great community to be a part of, but it’s certainly not one that respects your privacy (the CEO does not believe in privacy, so it’s not a surprise). While Facebook gives people the option to protect their profiles and contacts from leaking information to search engines, not many FB users actually take time to do it. That means your name could show up on Google with friends’ names right underneath, if you are not too careful with your privacy settings.
Facebook may be offering its users options to keep their private information safe. But it is not making their lives easier. I have never been impressed with Facebook’s design. It’s just not intuitive (very un-twitter like). In order to optimize your privacy settings, you could end up going through a dozen of pages and options and even then you may not get it right.
Robert Scoble’s proud proclamation of his Facebook page as an open book was astonishing and amusing at the same time:
changed all my settings to “as public as possible.” That solved a few things. 1. It made it easy to figure out the privacy settings. 2. I won’t be shocked if something leaks into public view because now I’ll expect it. 3. It lets me move on with my life
He is obviously a public personality (super blogger) and very entitled to his opinion. Not everyone is interested as being as open as Mr. Scoble. Besides, the fact that he took this step to make his life easier on Facebook proves my main point. Facebook is either intentionally making it hard for people to go through all those privacy settings or it needs better people in its team. There is no excuse in making it super difficult for people to protect their profile information.
Mr. Scoble’s way maybe one of the easiest ways to solve this whole Facebook privacy issue. But it’s even easier if people stopped sharing less of their private information with Facebook. If you want to stay private online, don’t share everything under the sun with Facebook and other social networks.