Facebook is heading down the wrong path
It’s been a long time since I read an article that caused me to feel as outraged as I do right now. But reading about Mark Zuckerberg’s ‘Public is the new “Social Norm”‘ statement I just couldn’t help but feel entirely speechless about how wrong their recent privacy changes are and how atrocious the argumentation behind it is.
Actually I’m not someone to quickly dramatize about privacy concerns. Most of it is really artificially generated hype from press, critics of social networks and people that simply don’t know how to change their privacy settings. Secondly I’ve been a big fan of Facebook ever since I first created my account and connected with friends I hadn’t seen in ages. Since I happened to live abroad for a long time, this was simply a great way for me to stay in touch with everyone.
I remember logging in recently to quickly write a message and was confronted with a pop-up window about privacy changes. Frankly, I don’t even remember anymore what I chose as option because I lacked time. I just remember that the message was about giving members more privacy control.
When I clicked on the profiles of a few people (not on my friends list) I noticed that much more details seemed to be visible than before and wondered why people would willingly divulge all that information. Well, the aforementioned article solved that riddle for me. Now, I must have magically chosen the right option back then but I barely remember doing that and many people have apparently chosen the wrong one (they simply clicked “next”) without knowing what was going to happen to their accounts.
Mark is right when he says that the attitude of people using the Web has evolved in the past 5-6 years. Of course, nowadays we don’t use fake email addresses anymore because the Internet is “unknown” territory where you prefer to be careful. Social networks with a lot of known contacts and official regulations have certainly helped to build trust and today I barely know anyone who doesn’t have a personal profile on some sort of network where she or he chooses to share information about themselves.
But that’s the crucial point. It’s about choice. A large company like Facebook – storing so much private data – shouldn’t be in the position to say “today we choose to innovate, we’ll make an experiment and subject all our users to what we think is a great change for them; we’ll be very sneaky about it so we make as many people as possible tag along without noticing it”. By doing so, they treated their users like guinea pigs and risked what currently is their biggest asset, that 350 million users still trust them enough to fill their profiles with personal information. Seriously, have they even considered for a second that people from the same industries and companies share Facebook as a network privately and do not want personal information to get out and compromise their business life?
It really doesn’t matter where Mark Zuckerberg sees the future and if Twitter is a threat to Facebook or not. A development into a more public approach could have been initiated in many different, many softer ways. But abusing a powerful position to shape the things the way you want them while playing with what’s most precious to people in general, their privacy, is bound to seriously tarnish Facebook’s image in the long run and I’m sure I’m not the only one feeling extremely disappointed about this. They should know that a change of the social norm always originates within people themselves and necessitates a majority feeling comfortable with it.
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Girl Goes Tech (GGT) is about a 26-year-old, female tech-addict exploring her geeky side and writing about social media, mobile trends and applications.