You may have heard by now, but Facebook doesn’t really care about your privacy one bit. At least that’s the impression left in the minds of many these days.
To compound the problem, Facebook has been less than open about the privacy concerns. And nothing makes PR worse than ignoring people who are complaining.
The instant personalization rollout took people off guard. They gave anybody the ability to instantly make a site social with the use of the new “Like” button. In fact, you’ll even see that we’re giving this button a try here on PCMech. For certain sites, though – namely Docs.com, Yelp and Pandora – this “Like” relationship is taken further.
Imagine saying in your Facebook profile that you like a certain artist, then when you go to Pandora, you’re listening to that song. Creepy is right. Now Pandora is getting access to information in your Facebook profile.
When you go to Yelp to find a place to eat, it can not only customize based on your favorite foods, but also tell you which restaurants your friends like.
Most people wouldn’t have any problem with this, in theory. After all, it is pretty convenient. That said, the beef has been that Facebook simply turns on these things for everybody, forcing you to opt-OUT of it rather than opt-in. Combine that with the super-craptastic interface, making it insanely hard to figure out how to opt out of it, and you have a user community who is losing trust in Facebook.
As Facebook continually rolls out these “improvements”, while seemingly paying only light lip service to the privacy component, the leading story about Facebook is that they don’t care about your privacy.
So, Facebook is holding a meeting today at 4PM PST to discuss this issue.
Some people are deleting their Facebook accounts. Others are proclaiming the beginning of the end of Facebook.
That’s not going to happen. Facebook is a BEAST. They have over 400 million users. Regardless of what anybody thinks, the growth will continue. What Facebook has is a problem with message. Their communication has been all over the place (at best) and the community is now writing their own stories about what’s going on inside the walls of Facebook.
Facebook needs to jump out in front of this issue and take the lead again. Hopefully today they’ll begin to do that.
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You would think people would know by now that any information one puts on the internet about oneself is not necessarily going to remain private, regardless of what the website initially tells you.
Considering some employers use social networking sites to determine if you are the type of employee they want to hire, you probably want to be very cautious about the type of information you place on any of these types of sites.
That’s probably not fair but neither is the world fair.
100% with David M. I wouldn’t put anything on facebook I wouldn’t want broadcast freely.
Also, to think that Facebook will never die is naive. I’m not saying this will necessarily end it. But there will always be the next big thing that takes over. It’s happened time and again: Geocities to My Space to Facebook. To…
I never said Facebook won’t die. But, this isn’t going to do it. Or start it for that matter.