Facebook Inc. (NASDAQ:FB) announced
Thursday that
it was finishing a process it started in December to make all Facebook profiles searchable
by all users. Users whose Facebook Timelines have been immune to the search
function will soon get notifications explaining that their immunity will be
removed by the Menlo Park, Calif.-based social network.
Facebook insisted the “Who can
look up your Timeline by name?” setting isn’t useful anymore and that privacy
controls on posts constitute a more effective way of protecting users’ privacy.
“The
setting was created when Facebook was a simple directory of profiles and it was
very limited,” Facebook said on its blog, explaining that the feature had never
prevented people from finding profiles via its News Feed or likes on other
posts.
When
the International Business Times asked readers about the Facebook change, opinions were
pretty evenly divided. Many didn’t seem to mind the social-media site’s actions
at all.
“If
you are putting yourself on facebook, you should be able to be searched. if you
don’t want people to find you, get off facebook [sic],” Devon Michael O’Connor
commented.
Facebook also said only a “small
percentage of people” actually used the soon-to-be-retired setting. It didn’t
specify the exact percentage, but the Associated Press indicated
the percentage is in the single digits.
If just 1 percent of Facebook’s
total user base took advantage of it, however, that’s still about 11.5 million
people. That’s a hefty number of Facebook users who actually care about their
privacy, and it’s likely the real number is much higher than that. Given that
most people never change their Facebook default settings -- possibly more than
95 percent, according to an extrapolation of figures reported by User Interface Engineering -- the social network could
potentially offend millions of active, engaged users with the policy change.
Being
concerned about digital privacy isn’t just for the tinfoil-hat crowd. Some
Facebook users don’t want certain people (read: stalkers) to follow their
online life. Facebook now only hides a profile from blocked users, but people
can easily create profiles with fake names and find the objects of their
obsessions.
This is just the latest reason
that some people are leaving Facebook. In May, Facebook was one of several
technology companies outed as a participant in secret U.S. National Security
Agency domestic electronic-surveillance programs such as PRISM. Edward Snowden,
the former NSA-contractor-turned-whistle-blower, reported that companies such
as Facebook even worked with the NSA to provide backdoor access to user data.
Facebook was one of the last companies implicated by Snowden to publish a transparency report about requests for information it
receives from the government.
“Why
not just call this what it is...NSABook [sic]?” wrote IBTimes reader Dan Brown.
“Just grateful I have a common name resulting in a frustrating search for any
loser with enough time to stalk me.”
In August, Facebook made sweeping changes to a couple of its governing legal
documents. Among these changes, the company rewrote its policies about
personalized advertisements, encompassing data-usage rules dealing with the
sharing of user data with others and what data third parties can retain. Along
the way, the company gave itself permission to know whether you are accessing
its services via Android or iOS product.
What
do you think about Facebook removing the option to hide your profile from its
Graph Search? Are you ready to delete your Facebook profile just yet? Let us
know in the comments section.
Source: IBTimes
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