To My Former Love:
Oh Facebook. I love how I can keep in touch with my friends from all over the world thanks to you. I love how pithy quotes from my funniest friends and the newest ridiculous group name make my day at work. I adore how interconnected all of my friends and tech-savvy family members are thanks to you. I’m clearly not a person who is terribly concerned about privacy issues; I only put on you what I WANT the world to see. Who am I to complain when they see it? But this new route you’re on is a slightly sketchy one. It’s one thing if my friends see the occasional drunken post or mildly inappropriate picture before I am able to untag myself. But you’re letting my information get into the hands of big companies who only want it so they can make money. And once it’s in their hands it’s out of mine.
That’s the rub. Facebook, you use my posts, my information, my friends and my photos to try and make money. And you should make money; you are providing an invaluable service to me for free. Unfortunately though, your latest change may have alienated some of your most loyal and privacy-averse fans. Open Graph, although not nearly as insidious as your failed Beacon initiative, has spread the famous “like” button across the internet. (I do find it very funny that at the bottom of an online piece about Quit Facebook Day is that ever-present blue thumbs up.) You think that eventually knowing all my friends like a certain site or a certain product will peer-pressure me into becoming a customer. Not a bad plan, but I still don’t want some company rifling through my information, sorting and classifying me in order to add to their bottom line. Worst of all, you didn’t even tell me you were doing this. You changed everyone’s privacy settings, and they had to find out from the media and sift through their dozens of privacy settings, one at a time, and reset them to stricter levels.
Worse still, I had to learn from a friend about the three sites that are part of your “instant personalization pilot program” and then go block them individually. Sure, hidden within the labyrinthine Help Center is a list, but that information is unlikely to be found by anyone not looking for it. And with your track record I know I’m going to have to keep checking back to see if any new sites are added. Sigh.
There is some hope though. Due to all this backlash you are unrolling new controls this week that will not only make it simpler to tighten our settings, you are also assuring us that any future changes will not reset all those carefully calibrated controls. Hopefully you will find a way to make your 5,830 word Privacy Policy easier to search and understand. But baby steps. It’s nice to see you’ve noticed our anger and are responding, even if it is probably to prevent May 31st’s Quit Facebook Day from being anything but a gimmicky stunt. In the meantime though, I’ve tightened all of my privacy settings, for the first time. Now only friends of friends of can see my witty comments and ridiculous pictures. At least until Wal-Mart or McDonalds is officially a friend of a friend. Then I may have adjust those settings again.
Posted by Becky on May 27, 2010 at 4:19pm.
