Privacy – The Impact on Facebook - Georgia24's Blog

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Privacy – The Impact on Facebook

Posted on September 24, 2012 at 12:19 AM.

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Facebook is a site that I was a frequent visitor to all during my high school, and early college career. During the last year or so I decided to delete my Facebook for two reasons: How confusing the privacy settings were, and the constant gossiping of my fellow peers. For me being able to log onto Facebook to check a few things here and there was fine, but after constant updates to the site, and different terms and conditions to agree to, I was done. I will discuss two main points on the privacy impact to Facebook in this blog on why it isn’t Facebook’s fault, but also why people are getting fed up.

My opinion of all of this was that Facebook was out to get as much information from me as possible, and they were going to do it in the slyest way too. After I read an article I noticed that Facebook has agreed to a settlement with the FTC to get a clean privacy bill of health every two years. (Manjoo) Having something like this would ease some people’s minds to know that they have at have some standards as to what they can and can’t do. Here is a quote that I pulled from the website at slate.com “You should approach Facebook as cautiously as you would approach your open bedroom window.” (Manjoo) This to me shows you that you can do whatever you want to, but someone may be there to do something harmful, and not just your grandma is seeing these pictures. Having a Facebook made me think that I was invisible to others that I blocked or made my page private to, but now knowing that even a single picture that I take and post can be traced to my house I now keep things like that off of the internet. I am not saying this is Facebook’s fault, just mine for being naive.

The flip side to this is that some users are fed up with the lack of privacy they truly have, and even after making a private page found out their information is still readily available. The constant updates that Facebook has are what get people on updating their privacy settings. One user from a site I visited posted a picture after an update showing her settings had been switched from her “Old Settings” to “Everyone”, and if she wanted them changed you had to go throw various tabs to reach them. (Hamlin) Having such a difficult and troublesome way of finding certain settings show why average people are getting fed up with Facebook and moving on to other business social network sites like Linked-In.

Hamlin, Kaliya. “Fed Up With Facebook Privacy Issues? Here’s How To End It All.” http://www.readwriteweb.com. N.p., 28DEC2009. Web. 3 Sep 2012. .

Manjoo, Farhad. “It’s Not All Facebook’s Fault.” http://www.slate.com. N.p., 30Nov2011. Web. 3 Sep 2012. .