May 2010

FaceBook, Privacy, and Content Grabbing

FaceBook has had a habit of arbitrarily changing their privacy policy, and modifying the software that allows FaceBook members to control what they want to share and with whom they wish to share. As the service has grown to, according to FaceBook, 400 million registered users with a privacy policy that is longer than the Constitution of the United States—and more arcane. One of FaceBook's recent changes was making privacy settings opt-in, that is, users' information is considered public by default. If you don't want anything you post or any information you provide to be made public, you need to set the privacy settings. This is fundamentally bad software design. You can see the increasing co-opting of FaceBook's users content by FaceBook here, in this graphic that shows the increasing absence of privacy, and member control over their data.

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