Facebook Exodus on The Cards

(News Today) - Facebook users are already deleting their accounts over recent privacy snafus as the Australian privacy watchdog steps in to ensure users are not being forced to share private information against their will.

The social networking site has promised to make significant changes to simplify its privacy settings in the coming weeks to avoid a mass exodus from the site.

The concerns from Australian Privacy Commissioner Karen Curtis follow similar warnings sounded by US senators, the European Union and various lobby groups.

They come as several online tools have sprung up to highlight the social networking site's privacy threats. Many users do not know that much of their profile is now public by default.

Youropenbook.org lets people search through status updates of all Facebook users who have not made their profiles private. Reclaimprivacy.org scans your privacy settings and tells you which information is public, while SaveFace can automatically lock user profiles down to the most secure settings.

A recent poll by Sophos of 1588 Facebook users found 60 per cent were considering deleting their Facebook profiles over recent changes seen as forcing its 500 million users into sharing more of their personal information publicly and with other websites.

Of those surveyed, 16 per cent claimed they had already stopped using Facebook as a result of inadequate control over their data. The phrase "delete Facebook account" has become a hot search term on Google and several campaigns have started, including "Quit Facebook Day".

One of the most high profile Facebook quitters is internet entrepreneur Jason Calacanis, who said Facebook had abused users' trust time and time again.

"Facebook is a Ponzi scheme run by a very bad actor," the founder of the Mahalo.com search engine wrote. "The best way to express our discontent with [founder] Mark Zuckerberg is to simply walk away."

Curtis said her office would be "discussing privacy concerns with Facebook over the coming days and we will be asking them to answer a range of questions that we have".

"My office does not support any business practice that forces an individual to share personal information publicly against their will," she said.

"I note that individuals seeking to create a Facebook account are advised that certain limited information will be publicly available."

Sophos senior technology consultant Graham Cluley said most people still did not know how to set their Facebook privacy options safely, finding the whole system confusing.

"What's needed is a fundamental shift towards asking users to 'opt-in' to sharing information, rather than to 'opt-out'," Cluley said.

"People use Facebook to share private information and are unlikely to want their holiday snaps or new mobile number accidentally popping up all over the internet."

Highlighting the privacy implications of recent changes, a Facebook user commenting on a previous story on this website said they found their Facebook profile image and name on the People magazine website after simply reading an article on the site.

"Imagine my horror to see my name and the picture I have on Facebook for all to see," the reader wrote.

"Bear in mind, I hadn't made a comment just read the article ... I was also classed as having liked the article."

Deliberate changes aside, Facebook has also faced a privacy backlash over several security flaws that inadvertently exposed private information and chat messages. There have been a string of similar privacy debacles since the site's launch, as collated by CNET News.

Facebook has admitted it has done a poor job of communicating to users the implications of recent changes and that its privacy settings have become too complex. The current privacy policy has 50 different settings and 170 options.

The site's cause was not helped by leaked chat logs from founder Mark Zuckerberg's Harvard days which showed the then 19-year-old calling users who trusted them with his information "dumb f---s".

In a radio interview this week the site's chief of public policy, Tim Sparapani, said simpler privacy settings were on the way.

"We are going to be providing options for users who want simplistic bands of privacy that they can choose from and I think we will see that in the next couple of weeks,” Sparapani said.

It is unclear where users who have already pledged to delete their Facebook accounts will go. MySpace, which has suffered significant traffic falls as a result of Facebook's soaring popularity, sought to take advantage of its chief competitor's woes this week by announcing its own privacy changes.

MySpace says it will roll out a "simplified" version of its privacy settings in the next few weeks. The new system will be a single slider that can be set to "public", "friends only" or "public to users over the age of 18".

Source : kompas.com

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