According to the big man himself, the real issue that people should be concerned about is not the level of privacy that they get on the internet, but rather how much control they have over how their information is shared.
To quote what the man said at Times: “The way that people think about privacy is changing a bit. What people want isn’t complete privacy. It isn’t that they want secrecy. It’s that they want control over what they share and what they don’t.”
Well said, but the big problem is that his social networking site Facebook does not seem to reflect that the man actually cares. In fact, there is nothing in that statement that shows that the concept of privacy control even matters to him. He does follow up the statement by talking about trends and how things are starting to shape up, but the bottom line of it all is that despite the fact that Zuckerberg already knows that users want control he is still not willing to give it.
Indeed, the real problem that people have with Facebook is not the issue with the slowly growing lack of privacy, but rather with the way that Facebook forced the situation on all of its users. When the social networking site started out, most of the information on a user’s profile can only be accessed by direct friends. In the past few months, this access restriction has slowly expanded until large chunks of user information are viewable by people searching through Google.
Sure, Facebook’s privacy settings will allow users to set things back to the way they once were, but the fact that people have to manually change the settings is the problem. Nobody is aware that the settings have changed in the first place. Facebook did a bad job at informing users –which should have never been a problem if they did not change all the setting. People should have the right and opportunity to opt in for special offers, setting changes and what not, but these changes should never be forced upon users.
Tags: Facebook, Privacy, Social-networking