一塊地 Piece of Land

It might sound silly but I've been bothered by Facebook's new privacy settings for quite some time. As a nerve wreck and a faithful FB user, I constantly check my privacy settings and filter my friend list. Starting this month, I started to notice some weird occasions on FB, so I went back to check again and again my privacy settings and couldn't find the old version of "News Feed and Wall" privacy setting. As a result, I searched in 'Facebook Help' and received tons of useless links. My past experience told me that FB is at least open about users' freedom to set up a Group or Page to criticize how awful FB is, therefore, I searched again and found several oppositional voices, the bring back "News Feed and Wall" privacy settings page, for instance.

It's nice to know I am not the only victim, or the only one who is pissed off by FB's brutal changes. On the one hand, FB shows their goodwill by showing the new 'Publisher' feature which allows users to define the privacy of your content on a per-post base (notice the little 'lock' icon?); on the other hand, FB is playing dirty work by eliminating users' choices to manage other features. As a keen FB observer, the most intolerable change for me is that I can no longer control the exact content I wish to share to my friends. For instance, the comments, including likes, I made on my friend's status updates or photos are all shown in News feed (not to mention the real-time Live Feed).

I am still figuring out how to manage my privacy from FB's recent changes, meanwhile, I feel the very complicated settings are trying to discourage my loyalty to FB. I have to admit though, there are several times when FB made major changes I started complaining and then eventually I got used to it. I reckon FB understands this rule of thumb: the audience has extremely short-term memory in the age of information overflow.

Nevertheless, FB also neglects a golden rule of social media users: visibility. Danah Boyd has a sharp critic on Internet users' mentality: people uses the same technologies but what they see and want to be seen vary from each other. In my belief, Facebook stop 'unifying' its users' visibility.   

 

More about Facebook's recent privacy setting changes? My recommendation goes to: 

Facebook's New Privacy Changes: The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly 

from Electronic Frontier Foundation

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