Facebook Changing Their Privacy Policy

ChippingSodbury

Hi,
Came across this today: http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/facebooks_zuckerberg_says_the_age_of_privacy_is_ov.php

The transcript from the video relating to his reasons for changing the privacy rules:

Zuckerberg:


"When I got started in my dorm room at Harvard, the question a lot of people asked was 'why would I want to put any information on the Internet at all? Why would I want to have a website?'

"And then in the last 5 or 6 years, blogging has taken off in a huge way and all these different services that have people sharing all this information. People have really gotten comfortable not only sharing more information and different kinds, but more openly and with more people. That social norm is just something that has evolved over time.

"We view it as our role in the system to constantly be innovating and be updating what our system is to reflect what the current social norms are.

"A lot of companies would be trapped by the conventions and their legacies of what they've built, doing a privacy change - doing a privacy change for 350 million users is not the kind of thing that a lot of companies would do. But we viewed that as a really important thing, to always keep a beginner's mind and what would we do if we were starting the company now and we decided that these would be the social norms now and we just went for it."

I don't use any social networking sites (have a Facebook account that gets used about once every 3 months!). If I did, I would be seriously upset with this change of policy. "There's no such thing as a free lunch" rings oh so true: these people don't set up these applications to "better society" but to make money by selling your data to interested parties.
This bit made me laugh:
"People have really gotten comfortable not only sharing more information and different kinds, but more openly and with more people"

Is it only me or do other people share my jaundiced view??

Ciaran500

Wrong thread title, Facebook already changed their privacy settings and for most things it can be setup the same way it always was.

TheZohanS

Moved to unSocial Networks

ChippingSodbury

Ciaran500 wrote: »

Wrong thread title, Facebook already changed their privacy settings and for most things it can be setup the same way it always was.

Yes, my title wasn't that accurate as they did this in December but I was rather hoping I would get other people's views on their change of tack and more importantly, their feeble reasons for doing so. They were shouting from the rooftops regarding their strict rules on privacy not so long ago....