Thanks to the mobile phone, more and more people are accessing social networking site Facebook every day. People use it to keep in touch, send messages, share videos, discuss issues and a great chunk of socialization activities that would have been hard or almost impossible to have in one’s busy, day to day lives. More often than not, stories and tales that one would normally share with mates down in the pub over the weekend could instantly become the topic of conversation even in the middle of the weekday –thanks to the social networking site.
Sadly, despite the great conveniences that Facebook gives to its users, Facebook has also become one of the biggest sources of worries for people concerned about their privacy. Facebook has been resetting one privacy option after another, neglecting to inform and notify users about the changes.
The odd thing is that end users have their priorities about the whole thing mixed up. End users are concerned about privacy issues, but their motives lie more with the fact that they are worried the images they posted about what they did during that last drinking party they attended.
Still, it does not change the fact that the solution ultimately lies in Facebook’s hands. The simple thing to do would be to reset all privacy settings to be as private as possible, then allowing users how much they should share. What they did however, was the exact opposite. Instead of resetting everything to private, the new Facebook defaults leaves many parts of a user’s profile information open to viewing by the public at any time.
This continuous lack of respect of privacy has encouraged the growth of several groups and websites that are encouraging people to quit using the Facebook social networking site.
However, it appears that despite the fact that many people (at least 3 in 5 users) are considering quitting the site, only a few actually ever do push through. And even if over a hundred thousand users suddenly decide to up and leave, Facebook would hardly feel the difference.
Tags: Facebook, mark-zuckerberg, privacy, Social-networking