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Digital rights groups and bloggers have heaped criticism on Facebook's changed privacy policy. Critics said the changes were unwelcome and "nudged" people towards sharing updates with the wider web and made them findable via search engines. The changes were introduced on 9 December via a pop-up that asked users to update privacy settings.
Facebook said the changes help members manage updates they wanted to share, not trick them into revealing too much. "Facebook is nudging the settings toward the 'disclose everything' position," said Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the US Electronic Privacy Information Center (Epic). "That's not fair from the privacy perspective." Epic said it was analysing the changes to see if they amounted to trickery.
Control reduction
In a statement, the Electronic Frontier Foundation said: "These new 'privacy' changes are clearly intended to push Facebook users to publicly share even more information than before. " It added: "Even worse, the changes will actually reduce the amount of control that users have over some of their personal data."
Facebook began testing the privacy changes during mid-2009 before introducing them site-wide. The changes let people decide who should see updates, whether all 350 million Facebook members should see them, and if they should be viewable across the web.
Barry Schnitt, a Facebook spokesman, said users could avoid revealing some information to non-friends by leaving gender and location fields blank. He said the changes to privacy made it easier to tune the audience for an update or status change so default settings of openness should have less impact.
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