[ed. FB and privacy - it's like a virus, you should probably do a scan every time you log on.]
Chances are that you don’t.
Responding to business pressures and longstanding concerns that its privacy settings are too complicated, Facebook announced on Thursday that it was giving a privacy checkup to every one of its 1.28 billion users.
The company, which is based in Menlo Park, Calif., will also change how it treats new users by initially setting their posts to be seen only by friends. It will explain to them that adjusting the setting to “public” means that anyone on the Internet can see their photos and messages.The change in default settings and the person-by-person review, which may shock users who suddenly realize how widely their personal information has been shared, is a sharp reversal for Facebook.
Facebook will change how it treats new users by initially setting their posts to be seen only by friends. It will explain to them that adjusting the setting to “public” means that anyone on the Internet can see their photos and messages.
“They have gotten enough privacy black eyes at this point that I tend to believe that they realized they have to take care of consumers a lot better,” said Pam Dixon, executive director of the World Privacy Forum, a nonprofit research and advocacy group. Ms. Dixon was briefed in advance about the latest changes.
For most of its 10-year history, Facebook has pushed — and sometimes forced — its users to share more information more publicly, drawing fire from customers, regulators and privacy advocates across the globe.
But for Mark Zuckerberg, the company’s co-founder and chief executive, more sensitivity to privacy might be good business.
Mr. Zuckerberg has seen privacy-friendly services like WhatsApp and Snapchat, and anonymous-sharing apps like Secret and Whisper, emerge as a competitive threat, particularly among younger users. That prompted him to strike a deal earlier this year to buy WhatsApp for as much as $19 billion.
“What we really want is to enable people to share what they want,” Mr. Zuckerberg said in an interview last month. “People read a lot of the stuff that we do as if we are trying to somehow get people to share more things, but all the core innovations are around giving people the tools they need to be comfortable.”
Facebook might also be acting to forestall any actions by regulators, who constantly scrutinize its privacy practices. European privacy officials are reviewing the company’s proposed acquisition of WhatsApp, which follows stricter privacy procedures than Facebook does. In the United States, the company is wrangling in a federal appeals court over how it uses the personal data of teenagers in advertising sent to their friends.
Even as Facebook takes steps to empower its users on privacy, it continues to introduce features that raise new issues. On Wednesday, it announced an optional service for mobile phones that eavesdrops on the sounds in a room to try to identify any music or television shows that might be playing. Facebook says it doesn’t store the information for long, but it is the first time the company has tried to listen in on its users’ lives.
by Vindu Goel, NY Times | Read more:
Image: uncredited
