These days, Facebook is almost synonymous with the college experience. What student with a computer isn’t on it? Facebook is going 400 million users strong with about half of them active daily logging about 500 billion minutes per month, according to Facebook’s statistics page.
Unfortunately, Facebook’s co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg thinks the world is becoming more public. With identity theft on the rise around the world, according to PCWorld, and the media bombarding the public with information about it, there is no way people are on board for sharing their most intimate Facebook information with whomever.
Facebook is rapidly becoming the new Internet, according to Internet research firm Hitwise. Facebook surpassed Google in hits in the U.S. in one week during March of this year, the first time that Google has been out of the top spot since it surpassed MySpace in 2007.
This should come as no surprise, seeing as the Internet has been in the throes of a social networking revolution for years now, but with all this traffic and personal information comes a great responsibility, one which Facebook just isn’t living up to.
Historically, Facebook has attempted to publicize personal profile data in such a way that, unless users opt out of it, the information automatically becomes shared. Though Facebook does keep a log of its changes, how many users actually read it? Facebook has a cycle in which it makes itself less private, and then when users complain, repeals those changes, only to attempt to implement them later. It’s a cycle Facebook needs to get out of, and not by throwing privacy to the wolves.
At its base, Facebook is a company. The company makes money by selling advertising. It makes the most money by selling advertising that is targeted to its userbase. In order for this to happen (and to make the big bucks), they have to share this data in one way or another with advertisers. In terms of data mining, Facebook is a veritable goldmine. No one can blame it for trying to stay in business while providing a service that is free to its users.
But Facebook’s privacy policy used to promise you a relative amount of security. This month, perhaps the worst affront to users from Facebook yet has taken place: connections. Education, work, current city, hometown, likes and interests will now be shared publicly with no way to opt out and are labeled as connections, according to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital civil liberties group. The only recourse of action for users is to delete the information.
As if that wasn’t bad enough, according to CNET, in addition to your connections, your name, profile picture and gender will be shared with three partner sites: Yelp, Pandora, and Docs.com under their new “instant personalization.”
Fortunately, you can opt out of this change by clicking on “Account” then “Privacy” settings, then “Applications and Websites,” then “Instant Personalization,” then click on “edit settings,” and finally, un-check the box at the bottom of the page. It’ll feed you some line about enriching your Web experience and recommend that you don’t. Though I do use Pandora, I see no benefit to having it linked to my Facebook account. My Internet radio stations are just fine.
You’d think I’d be done railing on Facebook, but it has a current policy that essentially allows any page you visit using your Facebook account to log in to collect your connections, according to PCWorld. It used to be the Web sites could only store this information for 24 hours. Now they may store it indefinitely. Facebook has rules in its privacy policy, but, of course, it states it can’t ensure that third party Web sites will follow the rules for your information.
So that’s it then, Mr. Zuckerberg? I can have no interests listed, or I can subject myself to data miners and advertisers who are just looking to make a buck? My information is going to be automatically shared with other Web sites indefinitely? That doesn’t seem very social at all. In fact, it’s rather anti-social. The majority of users who become aware of this are going to become less social because of it. My profile is now blank, and I’ve opted out of everything. The sound business choice would be to enact policy that encourages trust and sharing — the foundation for socializing. 
Ultimately, it falls on users to be web-savvy and choose which information to share on Facebook and which sites to share that information with. Still, the amount of data mining that’s being attempted here in the hopes that users simply won’t care, or will be ignorant of it, is despicable and disgraceful. Setting the information sharing on by default and claiming it is a way to increase web experiences in hopes users will want to do it? Well, that’s just a laugh.
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