The sweeping changes Facebook has made to its privacy policy are so complicated, and their effects so wide-reaching, that it seems the entire tech world is struggling to make sense of them.
Privacy organisations, no surprise, are none too pleased with the changes.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation concluded that “the changes will actually reduce the amount of control that users have over some of their personal data.” The Electronic Privacy Information Center said that the default settings “may result in greater disclosure than users intend.”
And the American Civil Liberties Union’s Northern California chapter said it was concerned that the changes “actually discourage or eliminate some privacy protections that Facebook users currently employ.”
Security experts are particularly concerned about the fact that Facebook is now pushing for users’ friends lists to be public. Sounding the alarm at Light Blue Touchpaper, Joseph Bonneau said that “the threats here are more fundamental and dangerous – unexpected inference of sensitive information, cross-network de-anonymisation, socially targeted phishing and scams.”
But are users upset enough that they might abandon Facebook altogether? Danny Sullivan, editor of Search Engine Land, was contemplating as much earlier this week after posting an exhaustive review of the myriad new options Facebook has confronted users with:
As an online marketer, I know that Facebook is a thriving, important venue. So I kind of have to keep an account. But I’m also giving up in some ways. This isn’t the place I’m planning to social network, because I just can’t expend the time to decide what I might be sharing, might not be sharing, what my friends might share, what friends of friends might share and then recheck all those settings every six months when Facebook does something different.
But a mass exodus seems unlikely. There are no viable rivals to Facebook at this point, and retreating from Facebook’s well-established social graph (all those millions of friend connections), would be exceedingly tedious. Moreover, it is not clear that any other company would do any better handling this much personal information. After all, this is the first time a social network has ever grown to 350m people.
Instead, some observers say that while there may be some growing pains, most users will learn to live with a more public Facebook. Marshall Kirkpatrick at ReadWriteWeb had a long conversation with Facebook’s director of public policy, Barry Schnitt, and concluded:
In the end, I suspect this will not be a terrible thing. People will not be completely unsophisticated in their engagement with these new settings, and some people will end up tiring of Facebook’s pushes towards public settings and leave for other emergent networks. And the world will become more public.
