I am utterly sick of the way facebook keeps doing this. I should choose how much I value my own privacy and not some service which doesn’t even seem to have any good goal in eroding it. If Mark Zuckerberg had brains the size of his ego, he’d probably realise that people will easily desert facebook the instant somebody designs something which respects it’s users.

Hi Bluespider,

That article can be found here: http://bit.ly/dAjA4A

Thanks,
Nicole

I left facebook last year because I didn’t like the direction it was going in. When my friends asked me why I wasn’t on Facebook, I told them, they don’t respect my privacy. I tell students, why do you think this issue keeps coming up again and again? Because FB are there to make money, using you and your information.
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Keep on p*ss*ng users off, FB, and they will leave you, the comments above show how some people have had enough.

Agreed, once again, not the smartest move ever of Facebook’s but Ryan Thomas is absolutely right, nobody HAS to use Facebook, nobody HAS to post all their information on it and it isn’t the only way of communicating with friends. If you don’t like it, leave, but please do it without throwing a tantrum like HMRC just posted your tax records on its home page. Oh, and don’t let the door hit you in the ass on the way out.

hey JFL if you value your own privacy why post private information on a third-party website?

Here’s an idea – don’t use facebook at all and try some normal relationships with people you actually know.

so the real question, who can find the juiciest ‘friendship history’ to share with the internet as a whole?

Learn to use private messages.

This feature exposes ZERO new data to ZERO new people who couldn’t already find it on their own.

I have a novel idea for you. If you don’t want people to see something, don’t post it.

Seriously PC Pro? You post an article like this and expect people to take you seriously? Get some common sense the entire point of facebook is to share things with people on your friends list.

This amount of ignorance being displayed in both this posts and by the commentators as utterly astounding.

1) It’s a SOCIAL NETWORK. The entire purpose of a social NETWORK is to allow people to interact with each other.

2) Despite my above point, Facebook already has privacy settings in place that allow you to hide your own statuses and other stuff from people who are friends with your friends. It takes about five seconds to change.

3) Sure, it will likely display things you say on another person’s wall, but then… why would you post something sensitive on a public page? You can use PMs, email, or face to face interaction for that sort of thing.

4) Your privacy settings allow you to hide 99% of the things you put on Facebook for whomever you want…. your own friends included.

My Facebook is set so that the vast majority of my information is visible only to people on my friends list. The only people who could take advantage of this new tool are our *mutual* friends.

If you’re too lazy to edit your own privacy settings, the problem here isn’t with Facebook…

*hands out tinfoil hats to everyone*

Here is what I tell my students: if you’re not the customer (i.e. you have paid money for the service), then you are the PRODUCT. FB’s customers are its advertisers. Its users are their product for sale to its customers. Products don’t have rights. You can choose not to be a product. Sadly, I keep choosing to be FB’s product.

You think this is bad – read this story about online privacy. Time to start a fake account and email that is separate from who you are for Google, Facebook, all of it. Even then, there’s only so much you can hide.

http://www.newsweek.com/2010/10/22/forget-privacy-what-the-internet-knows-about-you.html

I’m with Ryan Thomas, DVD, and others; if you don’t want information in the public domain, don’t put it on facebook.

Facebook is no place to share personal and private communication. When are people going to realise this. Facebook is a “PUBLIC” forum.
If you do not want people to see your information, do not put it on a “PUBLIC” forum. It’s that easy.

What a silly article. Scaremongering about stuff which is clearly there in the domain of those you’ve chosen to share it with. Clearly those who’re angry/scared really don’t have a clue about the internet, and should probably retreat before they embarrass themselves in front of those of us who do actually understand basic logic and personal responsibility for what we actively choose to share.

So is this just a souped-up version of the existing “See wall-to-wall” link, that’s been on Facebook for aaaaages?

@Kate Miller (and others) Facebook started out as a place to privately chat with friends. You couldn’t look at information about people who weren’t friends, other than their top level profile information, until you were friended.

Over the last couple of years, Facebook seem to have turned the privacy 180°. Instead of being private conversations among friends, more and more of it is, by default, open to the whole world – which is why a lot of long term users are getting upset with the ever faster slide from privacy to being 100% open.

People went to sites like Twitter, because they were open and they could send out posts to anybody and everybody who was interested.

Facebook was there for those who didn’t want to put everything out there, just share it with a few friends.

Now Facebook is becoming ever more like a clone of Twitter, with long messages…

I gave up and deleted my account about 6 months ago.

I’ve avoided Facebook despite considerable pressure to “conform”, and you know what? I’m wiping my brow and muttering “there but for the grace of Garfield…”. Having just found out that LinkedIn almost certainly has direct access to GoogleMail, the last thing I need is Facebook in my life.

Greemble, wrong. This shows you posts, pictures and any other common stuff between two people. It isn’t “Wall-to-wall” at all.

As for the article, it’s another sensationalist piece. Fact is the info was already accessible previously. Trying to say that before it would’ve taken too long so was OK is silly. I mean, does the author want the “all pictures from this person” removed too on the same basis?

Nothing to see here, it’s simply a feature that shows already-accessible info in a new form.

There’s a very easy way to avoid these Facebook developments – don’t join the bloody thing! It is so open to abuse and misuse I’m surprised anyone wants to be part of it – we all manged without this crap before!

Funnily enough about 90% of the material about me on Facebook didn’t get put there by me.

It’s hugely simplistic to say that if I don’t like Facebook I shouldn’t use Facebook. Apparently neither should any of my friends or any one else who knows me.

Or Facebook could work on the privacy protections, just a thought.

Isn’t the whole ethos of Facebook against privacy, as their business model? Didn’t it start as a way to publicly rate the sex appeal of students using their college ID pictures without their consent? Everything seems to point to them intending to overwhelm and destroy the very concept of privacy.

As privacy campaigner, obviously I won’t have anything to do with it, but increasingly other sites are requiring Facebook membership to participate in public discussion, and I keep getting “invitations” from the company that list multiple people who are contacts of mine (and some who aren’t), so they compile and hold information on non-members too, which is illegal.

Good news and bad news.

I know, you want to hear the good news.

Yes, this ’see friendship’ feature can be disabled. Completely. I tested it with different ways adjusting the settings.

Now the bad news. Well. I’m sure it is bad for 99% of facebook users.

1. Goto Account – > Privacy Settings

2. Click the link ‘Customize Settings.’

3. Scroll down to the third section ‘Things other share’

4. You will see this Friends can post on my wall [x]. Remove the checkmark

This means your wall is closed. Yes, bad news.

This means your friends can’t write on your wall.

Any previous messages are not deleted. You can verify this. You probably want to ‘clean’ your wall anyway as no new messages will be posted.

It gets worse. Any friend can’t see the ‘friendship’ between you and him/her.

And they can’t see your friendship with any common friends. Which is the objective of the change, correct?

Now, you are going to ask. How can they contact me?

There are only two basic ways:
a- Private messages.
b- You can change your status and they can reply to it in the comments.

In option b, when you change your status, you can make the change visible to a list or to a friend only.

You can also change your status and make it visible to one friend only.

The problem is, he/she doesn’t know that the message is only visibile to him/her. So you probably have to tell him/her in the status changed.

You want to test it? You need two friends. One to send a couple of messages and get a reply and another common friend that can verify that the messages exchanged are not visible to him/her.

Too complex? Yes, I know. So we probably want to stop using Facebook then.