Those semi-conspiratorial all-caps messages from mom sprawled all over your news feed might not be as crazy as they seem. Facebook is once again warring with its users over privacy issues—and this time it may actually have taken a step too close to Big Brother’s dominion.
At the center of the issue is the new Facebook Timeline. It’s a “digital scrapbook” that puts most of the information a user has ever shared on Facebook in one place. All posts, dates, pictures, comments, videos, notes and anything else a user once decided to post appear on a timeline at the side of the user’s profile page. Clicking on a year and a month brings up all posts in that time frame.
“Our job is to make this profile the best way to share everything you want and the best way to express who you are,” said CEO Mark Zuckerberg at Facebook’s annual developer conference in September.
But Timeline might share some things you don’t want.
Many of Facebook’s users signed up in high school or at the beginning of college, back when being media-savvy meant knowing the difference between Nickelodeon and Cartoon Network. The site was restricted at first to college students, and then high school students. More than a few F-bombs and raunchy tales were shared among the small groups of friends that interacted in the fledgling social network, only to disappear as users added new posts and status updates. Friends could still take the time to click back and see all of the coarseness, but that was never a big deal.
Then 800 million people joined.
Aunts, uncles, moms, dads—even grandmothers and grandfathers signed up for Facebook accounts. Employers began to check interviewees’ public profiles somewhere along the way, searching for a reason not to hire them. And suddenly it mattered what you said online.
So people changed the way they used Facebook. They dropped the foul language and untagged inappropriate pictures. And the things from the past stayed in the past, only accessible to those who took the time to slowly click back through months and years of content to find the person you used to be.
But Facebook Timeline brings those things back to within two clicks. It’s rolling out to all users this week, whether they want it or not. And that’s not the only change to hit the ’book in the last month.
The ticker, which everyone has by now, displays what friends are doing on Facebook in real time. Everyone has seen what it shows—so-and-so is now friends with you-know-who, John Smith changed his profile picture, etc. But few know that it also has the ability to spy on users.
The Washington Post recently launched a news application on Facebook that allows users to read articles straight from their news feeds. Clicking through to a news provider’s website is a thing of the past—now you can learn about your Aunt Suzie’s new foot ailments and Barack Obama’s visit to the Middle East in the same place. But the new ticker tracks every article you read, and shares the headline with friends.
Spotify, a popular new program for listening to music, does something similar. It lets users listen to almost any song ever released, on the stipulation they sign up with their Facebook account. The ability to hear everything from The Rolling Stones to LMFAO is great, as long as you’re OK with the fact that all of your Facebook friends know what you’re listening to in real time. Spotify shares this information with Facebook, which instantly publishes it on your profile.
Several parties, including the Electronic Privacy Information Center, are investigating Facebook’s sharing policies, and one man is suing the social network over privacy issues. The best way to avoid these concerns is not to use Facebook, but that’s hardly an option. Instead, know what you’re sharing, refrain from posting anything potentially harmful, and maybe, just maybe, listen to your mother’s rant on privacy. She may just be right.
