As many of you probably know, Facebook made drastic changes to its privacy settings a few months ago. Yes, Facebook is always making minor changes to it's layout, applications, privacy, etc. However, it's most recent changes regarding privacy were quite drastic. Basically, unless you PURPOSEFULLY go to your account and alter your privacy setting, your information has become free game for many companies and search engines; the steroid-using equivalent of the occassional facebook lurk. Unlike the aforementioned facebook lurk (a person who just creepily browses through your pictures and info boxes but is most likely a fb friend and overall harmless), companies and search engines who access your information can share it and use it to their advantage, which means bad stuff for you.
Because of this, I not only hope that many of you read the article, but make the privacy changes recommended. Yes, it will probably take a few minutes, but if I know how the majority of teenagers spend their time (and I think I do), you'll probably be there anyway, so why not?
3 comments:
To blame facebook would be reasonable, but why would facebook change their settings? They were probably paid large sums of money, and honestly, checking on your own privacy settings should become a habit. As we grow, we'll be dealing with many more serious information than facebook stuff.
Although FB claims that they were changing the privacy settings for the better, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California (ACLU), and the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) all denied the fact that its actually better. So I wonder, were they paid under the table?
I'm glad you posted this Sabrina! I'm going to go change my privacy settings right now.
And I agree with Yoda that fb was probably paid by companies that wanted more access to our pages for advertising.
I think a lot of young people like ourselves are not aware of the dangers the internet in general can pose and especially facebook... we spend soooo much time on it :/
Its a really safe idea to check our privacy settings even though most of us think the "lurks" are harmless
-Emily Niemann
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