Last week, Facebook opened up it's data to the Search Spiders of the Internet with comparatively little warning and even less buy in from its vast user base. The social networking site has done this many times before, ordinarily provoking a tempest in a teapot that lasts less than a week, after which the users go back to using Facebook just as before.
Is it the same this time? I didn't think so... I thought this wasn't an attempt to improve the service (as when FB started publishing all changes to the walls of all your friends in September of 2007, which provoked a former summer intern to call me in a lather on my commute to work one morning) but rather an attempt to compete with Twitter's ever-increasing amount of search data from its more open platform.
However, I didn't want to draw conclusions from my own response since I'm in the industry, so I reached out to my friend Kim D., a mom and avid Internet user who tends to be slightly more skeptical than me when it comes to her privacy and that of her family.
This is what Kim D. wrote:
The latest change on Facebook has made many of its users feel threatened rather than benefitted. I am one of those users. You can find one account of this issue here [http://valleywag.gawker.com/5522433/how-to-restore-your-privacy-on-facebook].
Facebook bills itself as an "online community." When you become a part of a community, by purchasing a home or renting an apartment, if you're savvy, you enter that community with certain expectations of control. You know the crime rate is low or at least tolerable; you know the things you need are nearby; you know many of your neighbors. You know the boundaries of your own property, and those of the community, and you hope that you have some sort of control over those parameters.
When burglars come into your community, you form a Neighborhood Watch and inform each other and the police of events that threaten your security or established parameters. Facebook used to notify its users of changes in "options" to control their information.
Over the past several months, it seems that there are changes every two or three weeks that are kept largely under the radar. These changes make you "opt out" or delete information you do not want broadcast to the 6,800,000,000+ people that inhabit Planet Earth. So now YOU have to do the heavy lifting in order to keep your personal information available to only your community. And your friends are your "neighborhood watch" in that they tell you what Facebook has done and how to un-do it.
It's enough to make this writer want to quit Facebook entirely, which would be a shame, because I really like my chosen community.
-- Kim D.
