The article I read on the recent changes Facebook has made to its privacy settings stated the negative reactions of how people felt. It went in depth to explain how scammers and identity thieves are able to easily access your phone number and personal home address. Hearing this news, many users threatened to boycott Facebook to join another social-networking site and delete their account. Two Senators also joined into the debate as they sent a combined letter to Facebook showing their concerns over the new privacy settings and voiced their opinions so that some changes can be made. To counter these concerns and arguments, Facebook replied back saying that users will be more aware of what will be shown to app developers when they want to play a new game or something else.
At the moment Facebook users are made aware of privacy changes on the top of their news feed. If there are new privacy changes that are going to be implemented soon, Facebook alerts users usually around a week before on the top on their homepage. Many users ignore this, including me, and move on to do whatever they were doing. I believe Facebook should send users an email to their customers when privacy settings are changed. From my perspective, Facebook should not have the right to share my personal information as it puts me in danger as scammers and other thieves now have easy access to where I live and can impersonate me. From the perspective of Facebook, they would benefit if they gave access of the personal information of users to developers. Millions of app developers want to develop their app on Facebook and are willing to may lots of money to do so.
I use my Facebook to interact with my family and friends that are not in Kuwait. I use it to see what my friends are up to and interact with them frequently. Privacy settings do concern me and after reading this article, I have changed mine too. Reading this article was shocking and now I wish to be more aware of what is going on in Facebook and if there is anything else that I need to do. If there are more privacy changes, I will make sure to be aware of what they are and use less apps to play games in order to not give out my personal information.
If you also wish to read the article I am talking about, check it out here:
I find it interesting that you, a frequent user of Facebook, was not aware of its privacy setting. Another interesting idea is the email notification regarding any privacy settings, which I think is more effective than a mere message that can easily be ignored. Finally, I do agree about the danger that is posed by the releases of user's personal informations.
ReplyDeleteThe people complaining are being offered a service and I feel like they should be looking into the privacy settings themselves. If the privacy settings are too extensive and not easy to find then a request to change the style can be made. Everyone using any social-networking site should know that once their information is up; its up. The internet is like that and nothing is really hidden, maybe just "more hidden, but theres always a risk.
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