Facebook’s new privacy changes are not making everyone happy, including some users as well as the American Civil Liberties Union and the Electronic Frontier Foundation. The two advocacy organizations have come out with hard-hitting and in-depth articles on the matter.
We’ve already covered many of the changes in detail, especially the ways that Facebook is now encouraging people to share content with everyone on the Internet. So here’s a look at the most significant criticisms.
“Publicly Available Information”
Facebook has exposed some personal profile information that was, for some people, previously private — and it has entirely removed the option of making much of this information private.
This “publicly available information,” as Facebook now describes it, includes profile name, profile picture, list of friends, current city, gender, networks, and pages. Users can choose to not let this content be indexed by web search engines, as well as limit searches for your name on Facebook to “only friends.” However, if users somehow navigate to a profile of somebody they’re not friends with — say, by looking at a mutual friends’ list of friends — there’s no way to hide most of this information from them.
Facebook’s argument, as it states in the new privacy explanation on the site, is as follows:
Making connections—finding people you know, learning about people, searching for what people are saying about topics that interest you—is at the core of our product. This can only happen when people make their information available and choose to share more openly.
When Facebook revised its privacy terms [...]