Wednesday, September 05, 2007
Privacy
Lifehacker: "Your Facebook profile will soon be available to search engines unless you disable search engine indexing in Facebook's Privacy Settings for Search."
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8 comments:
I have heard people discuss and complain about how facebook does not allow privacy anymore. I had problems with the new facebook but I got over them really quickly. This, however, is just nother example of the lack of privacy facebook is permitting. I do not believe this should be allowed.
I have a variety of things to say about this. First of all, there should be no reason to have facebook be open to anyone outside of college. I understand that it is a money-maker, but the initial mission statement said that facebook was created to be a networking tool for the top tier colleges to get to know one another. Okay, so it expanded, but now to come up on google? That's taking it too far. I did not create a facebook so i could have a myspace and nor am I used it as a personal blog. If i wanted one I would use the appropriate mediums for such and not one that is so open.
I don't want to be that adult that says "I remember when pluto was a planet and facebook was only available to 20 schools"
Interesting. I totally understand that Facebook wants to branch out into other venues and genres, thats cool with me. The thing that many students don't understand is that you can set privacy controls for every feature of facebook. Ive already set mine so that I cannot be searched through google. Your facebook experience can remain private if you want it to be.
The original facebook mission as I understood it is that the site was to be an open share network (in every sense of the phrase). Making profiles available to search engines is just another step towards that goal. Many people don't like all the new features that are growing by the day, but the site is still in its adolescence and is continuing to grow. Plus, you can turn off any settings you want so there is still a level of control.
It is a commercial business, and it makes complete sense that they would want to expand. Only allowing select schools to join would just be suicide and completely limiting to the company. While its not what it used to be, nobody says you have to use it, its just become part of the culture, so people feel obligded. I agree with Kim that you can just change your settings, and then not worry about it.
Facebook has enough privacy issues as it is, between minifeeds and the opening of it to everyone. The last thing the company needs is to put in yet another method to allow users information to become more public. The fact is that the majority of users don't understand how to use the privacy settings and the facebook explanation of the transition to being searchable by google didn't quite make it clear how to disable the feature.
back in the good old days, facebook was a reward for going to college. Everyone else had blogs and such, but it seemed to be a perk of graduating high school and moving on to other things. What facebook is now is just another 'myspace/livejournal' function and it's really too bad. It's now less of a way to keep tabs on friends, and just more of a hastle in your email inbox when you have to delete a mountain of facebook alerts. It's surpassed my desire to keep up with.
Hmm...looks like another thing they can add to that "how to use technology safely" lecture they give at orientation and then reiterate in CSW. Though it is a big thing for people to realize as it just makes it one step easier to locate information that you may not want available on the internet. But at least there is still some level of control to choose whether or not you want to use it. I'm just glad they still keep a strict hold over how the "applications" and other parts of the site are written so as not to have it be a virus filled trap like myspace.
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