The Electronic Privacy Information Center, the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the American Civil Liberties Union say the new settings expose too much private information. The changes, rolled out this week, make information such as gender and location easier to find outside of Facebook on the Internet, said Nicole Ozer, a policy director at the ACLU.
“Facebook should be doing an about-face on these privacy changes,” said Ozer, who focuses on technology and civil liberties from San Francisco. “These privacy changes were not good for privacy and users have noticed.”
Facebook, the worlds biggest social-networking site, now makes gender, location and profile picture publicly available — even without logging into Facebook. The changes also prompt users to share status updates and photos with everyone online. The new policy is a concern for Kimberly Nguyen, consumer privacy counsel for the Electronic Privacy Information Center in Washington.
“Were going to see pushback from users and others to have Facebook work on this a little bit more,” said Nguyen, who had urged Facebook to rework its previous privacy controls. “Basically it seems like Facebook actually is encouraging people to move toward greater disclosure of their information.”
More Specific
Facebook, based in Palo Alto, California, said it changed the settings to let users get more specific about how and where their information is shared. Following complaints this week, the company announced plans to make it easier to restrict information on users lists of friends outside of Facebook.
More than 50 percent of Facebook users have customized their privacy settings after being prompted, compared with 15 percent to 20 percent prior to the changes, said Barry Schnitt, a company spokesman. In introducing the new options, Facebook asked all of its users to review their settings this week.
In the message, Facebook asked if users wanted to retain the old settings or adopt suggested changes. The tools also let users select how their posts, such as messages and photos, are distributed. The default setting would share that information with “everyone,” making it available on the Internet. That would make the site more like Twitter Inc., where status updates are public by default.
Confused or Distressed
“With a user base of 350 million users, we knew that there would be some people who would not like what we were doing or were confused or distressed by it, but the scale of those concerns is orders of magnitude lower than other changes we have made and the site is much larger now,” Schnitt said. “While were listening to our critics, we are listening most closely to our users.”
With earlier changes to the site, protest groups attracted hundreds of thousands of people on Facebook, he said. This time, the users opposing the policy have numbered in the hundreds, Schnitt said.
“For those wondering, I set most of my content to be open so people could see it,” Zuckerberg said in a posting on his page. “I set some of my content to be more private, but I didnt see a need to limit visibility of pics with my friends, family or my teddy bear.”
City Networks
Facebook added the city location to users information after it eliminated geographically based networks within the site, Schnitt said. The London network, for example, had millions of people, letting everyone view one anothers personal data. Thats no longer the case.
While a users Facebook profile picture can be seen online, theres no requirement to supply a photo, Schnitt said. As for the gender information, it helps Facebook use the proper pronouns, he said. And it often can be determined from the photo anyway, so theres no additional loss of privacy, Schnitt said.
The new settings are a step in the right direction, even if Facebook could have done a better job designing them, said Berin Szoka, senior fellow at the Progress & Freedom Foundation in Washington, which promotes a free-market approach to the Internet. The new tools let users fine-tune their preferences, he said.
“The best thing is to figure out that very fine balance between ease of use, friendly interface and granular control,” Szoka said. “As long as we give them room to experiment and move in that direction, they will innovate.”