These are excerpts from an open letter to all users of Facebook from the creator, Mark Zuckerberg
-Facebook's current privacy model revolves around "networks" — communities for your school, your company or your region. This worked well when Facebook was mostly used by students, since it made sense that a student might want to share content with their fellow students.
-However, as Facebook has grown, some of these regional networks now have millions of members and we've concluded that this is no longer the best way for you to control your privacy. Almost 50 percent of all Facebook users are members of regional networks, so this is an important issue for us. If we can build a better system, then more than 100 million people will have even more control of their information.
The plan we've come up with is to remove regional networks completely and create a simpler model for privacy control where you can set content to be available to only your friends, friends of your friends, or everyone.
-We've worked hard to build controls that we think will be better for you, but we also understand that everyone's needs are different. We'll suggest settings for you based on your current level of privacy, but the best way for you to find the right settings is to read through all your options and customize them for yourself. I encourage you to do this and consider who you're sharing with online.
Thanks for being a part of making Facebook what it is today, and for helping to make the world more open and connected.
well, thats actually a large portion of the letter. I just found it very very interesting.
I am really glad that you brought this up, Katherine because I have been experiencing with my privacy issue for a while. Although, I want to share some information, pictures, and other interactions with my friends, I still want to keep some privacy for obvious reasons (parents, jobs, etc.). I've been wanting facebook to do something about it because I don't think what they have right now is THAT efficient.
ReplyDeleteTo go a little bit further, I truely believe that I (and I believe a lot others out there) feel this way about privacy issue because our society/community make us feel this way. For example, if you want to get a job that deals with "fashion," you might need to show them somehow beyond (perhaps via social network site like facebook) the job interview. However, you don't want to expose too much of yourself and show your future boss pictures of your drunken night.
I too am interested in the changes at Facebook.
ReplyDeleteFacebook was originally organized around by offline social structures (schools, offices, cities). I understand that they are not doing away with all networks but simply the regional networks, however this seems to be a pretty fundemental change. It is a change that alters the way people associate on Facebook.
This change was done on the basis of privacy concerns but also changes the way that Facebook organizes people. No longer does Facebook consider geographic boundries to be a similarity enough to allow people to share content with each other. While allowing people to more easily limit who they interact with online, this change sets moves Facebook further from an organizational structure based on offline interactions and closer to a worldwide united community.
(Reading over this post I'm not sure that it really makes sense but I understand what I am saying and will try to explain in class)
although this pertains to facebook, i think the privacy issue is definitely something we should be concerned about regarding our site as it is also a "network"
ReplyDelete