Facebook and Privacy (again)

It seems like once every three months or so Facebook finds itself embroiled in another privacy controversy. The latest one is their Instant Personalization thingie (or at least whatever it’s being called). This started when FB users discovered when they went to other sites like CNN that CNN already knew who they were or who their friends were and what stories CNN thought they’d like to see.

Since this person didn’t know they’d already “opted in” to this FB service (apparently FB didn’t feel the need to let users know they were doing this), they were understandably not happy. FB did the usual spin control on it by saying they would meet about it and once again work to ensure users were satisfied with the amount of privacy they had on their accounts. OK, I’m paraphrasing here of course but essentially they were saying “yeah sure we’ll work on this.”

Funny thing about FB. They keep changing their privacy settings and I try to keep changing mine too, but they seem intent on making the process as difficult as they can.

Yesterday I found out about this site: http://www.reclaimprivacy.org/ . It has a button you can add to your browser toolbar that scans your privacy settings when you log into Facebook. So I installed it, logged into FB and ran the scanner. I didn’t do so bad..4 out of 6 settings they ran were fine. The other two were not so good and when I tried to fix them, I had to wade through two of three levels to change the setting.

I can’t speak for anyone else but I find it interesting FB chose to bury these important settings two or three levels down. I felt like they were trying to make it difficult for the average user to change them. So it appears that not only is FB not informing users of privacy changes they make, but also they appear to make it difficult for all but the more savvy users to change them. Hmmmmm.

Facebook keeps getting bad press about their privacy issues and they don’t seem to really care. Are they that clueless or are they only interested in selling your private information to the highest bidder?

Inquiring minds not only want to know, they need to know.