New Facebook Privacy Changes

Written by on May 26, 2010 - 0 Comments
Categories: "Social Soup"

Originally facebook was considered a ‘walled garden’. Information was largely restricted to those you had ‘friended’. Although for many this was a good thing, I personally felt that twitter had an advantage over facebook in that it allowed me to discover new people and make new friends that I never could have connected with via facebook (because I didn’t even know that they existed!).

As facebook made strides to adapt it’s network to its increasing members, and to make it easier to find and share information that was of interest, it opened up new ‘channels’ that allowed people to see more of each other.

As a result, privacy was reduced and for some that caused serious heartburn!

It’s a double-edged sword so to speak. As I often say ‘when you block the bad, you also block the good”.  The opposite of course holds true too.

I personally like the fact that I can see who ‘likes’ what pages and who became friends with whom (even though that was a major point of contention for many at the time of that change).

If I see a friend ‘like’ a page that sounds interesting, I can check it out. If I see that 10 of my friends became friends with someone, I might want to know them too.

The ability to ‘mention’ a friend (creating a link and not just their name) in a post was also a big step in helping people ‘meet new people’ as you can now easily click on the link and find out at least a little bit about them and decide whether you want to connect with them.

Community pages were recently introduced (which I think few people even know about!) and while I won’t go into them here (stay tuned for future post), the ability to find others based on similar interests is great, and this is a great way to find them, but again, most people don’t want their posts being used to populate them (especially since they aren’t aware that they are and don’t realize that they’ve ‘given permission’).

In any case, there are good and bad points in all of this. Ultimately I think we have to remember that the network belongs to facebook and they can choose how it works. Especially since it is free! (although I add that most of the place that I pay for service don’t let me choose either!)

There are many other ways and places that the information on Facebook is ‘shared’. I encourage to be aware of them.

I also encourage you to never consider ANYthing that you put on the internet to be ‘private’, and remember, it is  permanent!

Read about recent changes to facebook privacy settings here

 

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