Facebook under fire for privacy revamp

 

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By Reuters

Posted on 10 Dec 2009 at 10:17

Facebook's recent revamp has been criticised by privacy advocates, who claim the service is pushing people to share all their information.

The social-networking site recently updated its privacy controls in an effort to make it more obvious what was being shared. However, the implementation of the new settings has drawn criticism from privacy advocates who claimed the changes are pushing Facebook's 350 million users to expose more of their personal information.

"Facebook is nudging the settings toward the 'disclose everything' position. That's not fair from the privacy perspective," said Marc Rotenberg, Executive Director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center.

When asked whether his organisation might consider lodging a complaint with the US Federal Trade Commission, he responded: "Let me put it this way, right now we're taking a lot of screenshots."

The complaints were echoed by the The Electronic Frontier Foundation. "These new 'privacy' changes are clearly intended to push Facebook users to publicly share even more information than before.

The changes will actually reduce the amount of control that users have over some of their personal data

"Even worse, the changes will actually reduce the amount of control that users have over some of their personal data," the organisation says in a statement.

The move comes as search engines such as Google and Bing are increasingly interested in incorporating the growing trove of user-generated content from social media websites into their search results.

The new privacy features make it easier for a Facebook user to limit certain messages to a subset of their friends, such as family members but not work colleagues. However, for the first time Facebook's users also have the ability to broadcast their musings, photographs, videos and other personal information to the web.

"Any suggestion that we're trying to trick them into something would work against any goal that we have," said Facebook spokesperson Barry Schnitt.

He said that Facebook was recommending that posts be viewable to everyone because such sharing of information is consistent with "the way the world is moving."

In October, Microsoft announced plans to incorporate Facebook messages flagged for the general public into its search engine results, although the service is not yet available.

Google recently announced plans to incorporate certain Facebook data in its new real-time search product, but the data will be limited to the special public profile Facebook pages created by celebrities and companies.