Since its incorporation just over five years ago, Facebook has undergone a remarkable transformation. When it started, it was a private space for communication with a group of your choice. Soon, it transformed into a platform where much of your information is public by default. Just the statement itself – Facebook Privacy – is as ironic as it gets.
Since its incorporation just over five years ago, Facebook has undergone a remarkable transformation. When it started, it was a private space for communication with a group of your choice. Soon, it transformed into a platform where much of your information is public by default. Today, it has become a platform where you have no choice but to make certain information public and this public information may be shared by Facebook and its partner websites to target ads. To help illustrate Facebook’s shift away from privacy, we have highlighted some excerpts from Facebook’s privacy policies over the years.
Watch closely as your privacy disappears, one small change at a time!Anastacia Victor
Facebook Privacy Timeline
Facebook Privacy Policy 2005: No personal information that you submit to facebook will be available to any user of the Web Site who does not belong to at least one of the groups specified by you in your privacy settings.
2006: We understand you may not want everyone in the world to have the information you share on Facebook; that is why we give you control of your information. Our default privacy settings limit the information displayed in your profile to your school, your specified local area, and other reasonable community limitations that we tell you about.
2007: Profile information you submit to Facebook will be available to users of Facebook who belong to at least one of the networks you allow to access the information through your privacy settings (e.g., school, geography, friends of friends). Your name, school name, and profile picture thumbnail will be available in search results across the Facebook network unless you alter your privacy settings.
2008: Facebook is designed to make it easy for you to share your information with anyone you want. You decide how much information you feel comfortable sharing on Facebook and you control how it is distributed through your privacy settings. You should review the default privacy settings and change them if necessary to reflect your preferences. You should also consider your settings whenever you share information. … Information set to “everyone” is publicly available information, may be accessed by everyone on the Internet (including people not logged into Facebook), is subject to indexing by third party search engines, may be associated with you outside of Facebook (such as when you visit other sites on the internet), and may be imported and exported by us and others without privacy limitations. The default privacy setting for certain types of information you post on Facebook is set to “everyone.” You can review and change the default settings in your privacy settings.
2009: Certain categories of information such as your name, profile photo, list of friends and page you are a fan of, gender, geographic region, and networks you belong to are considered publicly available to everyone, including Facebook-enhanced applications, and therefore do not have privacy settings. You can, however, limit the ability of others to find this information through search using your search privacy settings.
2010: When you connect with an application or website it will have access to general Information about you. The term general Information includes your and your friends’ names, profile pictures, gender, user IDs, connections, and any content shared using the Everyone privacy setting. … The default privacy setting for certain types of information you post on Facebook is set to “everyone.” Because it takes two to connect, your privacy settings only control who can see the connection on your profile page. If you are uncomfortable with the connection being publicly available, you should consider removing (or not making) the connection.
Facebook Privacy – Public by Default
Notably amongst these policies that raised questions is the changes in its ‘normally default setting to public’ rather than private; this implies that some users information automatically become visible to web users and on the other hand, users who would like to opt out were forced to go through some 50 settings with more than 170 different options to protect their privacy.
Facebook has claimed that we have control over who views what; but they have failed to provide us a sort of control to companies we ‘like’. If you become a fan of a page facebook displays your profile photos, and bio data next to an advertisement for that page. We certainly do not have an option here.
They may share your information with trusted third parties including responsible companies with which they have a relationship, anyone can post a photo or video of you without your consent and you can only remove the tag shouldn’t consent be required? Hell no because they have changed several points of their privacy policy so that they are allowed to release more of this data to third parties.
It’s unfortunate that facebook use the people they depend on for their success because It is an established fact that facebook is taking advantage of it users with Mark Zuckerberg response to the privacy Issue
“The Age of Privacy is over. Doing a privacy change for 350 million users is not the kind of thing that a lot of companies would do. But we viewed that as a really important thing to always keep a beginners mind and we decided that this would be the social norms and we went for it. And our aim is to give users precise control over their private information.”Mark Zuckerberg response
Facebook Privacy – How Ironic!
In Analysis, the successive policies tell a clear story. Facebook originally earned its core base on users by offering them simple and powerful controls over their personal information. As Facebook grew larger and became more important, it slowly but surely helped itself, its advertising and business partners to more and more of its users’ information, while limiting the users’ options to control their own information.
Happy Facebooking! – Anastacia Victor
