The Truth About Facebook’s New Privacy Settings

According to ComScore, 5.5 percent of all time spent online in the U.S. during the month of November was spent on Facebook, making it the website with the most time spent on it; even more than Google, Yahoo, YouTube and Twitter.

Although Facebook has more users than Twitter, it is interesting to note that Twitter does have one huge upper-hand… real-time search!

Recently the social media giant Facebook reset the default privacy settings for its 350 million users. The initial settings were meant to keep the information of users private, but the recent changes have flipped this idea on its head. The new default settings persuade users to make their information viewable for EVERYONE!

As a public relations graduate, I don’t fall for spin tactics very easily, so when the company released a video in their blog that said they were doing this to “give you even greater control over the information you share,” I was a bit suspicious.

After a bit of research I confirmed my suspicions and got to the real reason behind a change that seemed to have come from left field.

Writer’s at ReadWriteWeb, Mashable, Electronic Foundation and TechCrunch all agree that this is all a part of Facebook’s goal to become part of the real-time search that Twitter has already taken advantage of.

Jason Kincaid, writer at TechCrunch says in his article, The Facebook Privacy Fiasco Begins, “Facebook is giving up its reputation as a ‘private’ social network — where the default is to restrict access to everything that is shared — in favor of something that can challenge Twitter head on.”

Granted, this is a good thing to help Facebook grow, which in turn should create a better experience for users, but the backlash that will come from such an enigmatic and drastic change can hurt the company’s credibility and end up doing more harm than good.

I’m sure we’ve all heard the stories of users that tend to over-share information and end up getting in trouble; whether it’s a cheating spouse, a disgruntled employee or a parent/child relationship.

We’ll have to wait and see how this story unfolds, but I’m sure the “stuff” will hit the fan soon and cause a massive outrage from the majority of users that are sure to ignore these new privacy settings as most do whenever Facebook gives an update on a new feature.

Here’s an update on the issue from Read Write Web:

Some users are saying that their default options are in fact on “old settings” and not “everyone.” We’re hearing that “old settings” as private is the default for users who have ever changed their privacy settings and set them to private. People who have not changed their settings ever or who have set them to public already will be defaulted to public. That’s what we think; it’s hard to know for sure. Facebook is maddeningly unclear about what exactly is going on. Part of the problem is that they are willing to tell press that they want to move users toward being more public, but when communicating with its users they appear to put more emphasis on communicating about privacy than is warranted by the changes at issue.

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