New Defaults Expose Facebook Profiles
Jason Calacanis attacks Facebook’s new privacy defaults. Here’s some highlights from his latest email:
When faced with a TOS (Terms of Service) or license the world has been trained to hit the word “agree,” and click, click, click until they get to the actual website or software they were trying to get to in the first place. Everyone in the industry knows this, and certainly a company built off of studying social behavior like Facebook would.
Think of all your friends that gave up personal information to plugin developers, to access “quiz” surveys that ask even more personal questions. You can bet these same people click “I agree” to whatever pops up on their screen.
So why is Facebook trying to trick their users?
Simple: search results.
Facebook is trying to dupe hundreds of millions of users they’ve spent years attracting into exposing their data for Facebook’s personal gain: pageviews. Yes, Facebook is tricking us into exposing all our items so that those personal items get indexed in search engines–including Facebook’s–in order to drive more traffic to Facebook.
Is he right? If everything on Facebook is private, there’s not as much to see, which means Facebook can’t show you as many ads. Make pages less private and Facebook gets more pageviews, more search traffic, and more backlinks.
Jason Calacanis is not alone here, Kevin Bankston says essentially the same thing:
Our conclusion? These new “privacy” changes are clearly intended to push Facebook users to publicly share even more information than before. Even worse, the changes will actually reduce the amount of control that users have over some of their personal data.
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