Facebook has been making a lot of changes recently and many of which I am not pleased with them. Most of the issues mainly come down to privacy, which is slowing eroding away. The default privacy settings on Facebook are defaulted to Everyone. Everytime a new privacy setting comes along, it’s setting is usually defaulted to Everyone. It seems that Facebook is trying to push users to be more open and public whether if they know it or not and if they like it or not.
One of the recent changes on Facebook is that the information that is listed on profiles have been turned into “Connections”. This means that now just about every piece of information listed on your profile is now associated with a page you like (or are a fan of), and they’re public too. This includes your current city, hometown, education, work history, and all your interests and activities. The problem with this is your connections are now public to everyone. Sure, you can control the “Visibility” of them on your profile, but that doesn’t mean they won’t show elsewhere on the site publicly to others that aren’t your friend. For example, when you make a connection to a page by simply liking the page, it is possible that you will show up on the page under the list of the people that like that certain page. There is, however, pages you cannot control the “Visibility” of on your profile and these pages are ones that not categorized, which are the ones placed under the Other category, in your interests. Also, every page you like is also able to show posts on your news feed unless you explicitly choose to hide them from your news feed or decide unlike the page.
I have decided to unlike every page I “liked” since I have became annoyed with all the news feed spam I received from these pages and how the connections were made public to everyone. This means that I no longer have any interests listed on my profile, oh well. I have noticed that when you do list your current city, hometown, education, and work history, you do not automatically like the page associated with it. This means if you unlike these pages, Facebook does not remove these pieces of information from your profile.
Another issue is that if you mention a page’s name in any post on your wall, it may show on up the page itself without you having any say of this happening, regardless if you have a connection with the page or not. If the privacy on the post mentioning the page is set to public, it may be visible for everyone to see on that page.
You are automatically opted in Instant Personalization which automatically shares your public information. Currently sites such as Docs.com, Pandora, and Yelp are able to see your public information. You can opt out from Instant Personalization, but this does not prevent your friends from sharing information about you to these sites, which Facebook says, “Please keep in mind that if you opt out, your friends may still share public Facebook information about you to personalize their experience on these partner sites unless you block the application.” So in order to fully opt out, you must block every application that is part of Instant Personalization to prevent any information from being shared, which is completely unacceptable.
Data you have set to private is shared with apps you use on Facebook. Almost all your data is shared with applications you authorize. Even your friends can share information about you to applications they use without you knowing. This is a big issue since you are now trusting the application developers to keep your data private. Many of application developers are unknown and this creates a major risk of your private data spreading. Facebook does not check applications to see if they are indeed doing something malicious such as ones out there to steal user’s information.
