New Facebook Privacy Settings - How to Adjust (December 2009) Archives

New Facebook Privacy Settings - How to Adjust (December 2009)

Facebook recently changed its default privacy settings, with little advance notice to the majority of its users.

Isn't it about time that we started holding our online brands to the same standards that we hold our offline ones?
Case in point, consider Facebook. In Facebook's relatively short life, there has been the Beacon Debacle (a 'social' advertising model that only Big Brother could love), the Scamville Furor (lead gen scams around social gaming) and now, the Privacy Putsch.

By Privacy Putsch, I am referring to Facebook's new 'Privacy' Settings, which unilaterally invoked upon all Facebook users a radically different set of privacy setting defaults than had been in place during the company's build-up to its current 350 million strong user base.

To put a bow around this one, the EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation), not exactly a bastion of radicalism, concluded after comparing Facebook's new privacy settings with the privacy settings that they replaced:

"Our conclusion? These new 'privacy' changes are clearly intended to push Facebook users to publicly share even more information than before. Even worse, the changes will actually reduce the amount of control that users have over some of their personal data."

"Is Facebook a Brand that You Can Trust?," by Mark Sigal, Radar, December 2009

Here are a few articles and videos that address how to adjust your Facebook privacy settings.