Facebook New Privacy Options Suck! – Your Privacy Is Now Gone

If you use Facebook, you must continue reading this post. It is important as it discusses the new Privacy settings that Facebook has recently launched and how your privacy level has decreased.

Let me first say, Facebook states that “You will have more control than ever on who gets to see and has access to your information”. Let me say, this is absolutely false.The new change is Facebooks way to say “We are going to share as much information as possible to the world.”

The old privacy page used to give you heaps of control of who gets to see what. For example, you could block people from reading your status update, but still let them see what people post on your wall. You could easily turn the option on and off with ease.

But now, everything is bunched together, and it makes it harder to to hide status updates from certain people. One of the new features in the privacy settings is to allow you to only share certain wall posts to only certain people. “Well done Facebook, you have done something right for once!” However, once you hit the post button, you can not change the setting again.

I have only two people on my Facebook that I want to block status updates from. Since I changed to the new privacy settings, they had the ability to read all of my status updates. I quickly tweaked the settings to try and hide it from their view. I finally did, however, their are a few updates I made which they can permanently see and I cannot block access to them. This is just proving that Facebook are not doing everything they can to help with privacy.

Another privacy issue I found is that applications of your friends can get access to your personal information as well. Just have a read of this:

When your friend visits a Facebook-enhanced application or website, they may want to share certain information to make the experience more social.

If your friend uses an application that you do not use, you can control what types of information the application can access. Please note that applications will always be able to access your publicly available information (Name, Profile Picture, Gender, Current City, Networks, Friend List, and Pages) and information that is visible to Everyone.

This is another way how Facebook can get your information. Make sure you untick every single application so they do not get what they want.

When transitioning to the new privacy settings, Facebook wanted me to set my PERSONAL INFORMATION to EVERYBODY! I thought they wanted to increase privacy not reduce privacy. This is another example of Facebook going “public” with your information. I tried to set everything to “Only Friends” but not every setting had this option. Ultimately, if you don’t change your settings, all your personal information will be set to “public” making it visible to everyone. The only way to ensure that only your friends view your page and the public can’t see your information, is to change your age to under 18. But have fun doing that. You need a school email address first.

So since I have set everything to Only Friends, people who visit my public page will now only see the Facebook pages that I have joined as there is no way for you to hide this.

Overall, your Facebook privacy controls have decreased, and Facebook has made your profile more visible to others. Go back to the old way Facebook. Every change you have made, you just make things worse. If you didn’t have so many members, and it wasn’t “I need to sign up because all my friends are on it” You would be luckily to have 1 million members. With 350 million users, you should look after them better. Like people say. “If its working good. Why change it.” I would really hope that by this time next year, you only have 250 million registered users.

So to anyone who read all this, what are your thoughts on the new privacy settings? Do I have a point? Do you like the new change? I really want to know if people agree or disagree with my argument.

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  1. By JackCola

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