Facebook Takes A New Step Toward Openness

Today Facebook made another large announcement about making profiles accessible to everyone. Via a new privacy setting, you can grant individuals access to more profile data about yourself. According to the Facebook post: By changing your Profile setting to "Everyone", anyone who finds you through a search on Facebook or sees a post or comment you make can now click on your content and view the elements of your profile you've opted to make open. While some special rules remain in place about who can see your profile if you are a minor, people generally won't need to be friends with you or share a common network in order to view your content if you choose the new "Everyone" setting. This is part of Facebook's movement toward openness. One big step that I'm awaiting is the ability for Facebook status updates to be completely public. Once that takes place, Facebook will have essentially duplicated the majority of Twitter's features. So why is Facebook making profiles information optionally public to everyone? Ultimately the company needs to spread awareness about the movement toward openness and the trend toward more public lifestyles. I've regularly written about what I call Facebook's "privacy facade" in which new users to the site expect a certain level of privacy. Many people have grown to assume that there is no privacy on the internet but on Facebook it's expected. Many individuals like to put their information out in the open for self-promotional purposes though and these new settings enable that.

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Facebook Takes A New Step Toward Openness

Nick O'Neill

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Nick O'Neill