At first I was reluctant to write yet another blog entry on Facebook, but after noticing that more than fifty percent of my Facebook friends are complaining about the new privacy policy in their status I decided that non-Facebook users might want to know what all the cyber chatter is about. As you will recall, it was forecasted some months ago in Wired Magazine that Facebook would eventually harness its users’ information and offer the same to search engines. Following the article, Facebook changed its default privacy setting to allow advertisers to use their users’ pictures. The change resulted in many Facebook users logging in to alter the default setting. Now there are more changes to your Facebook default settings which the New York Times cleverly placed in a chart to make sense of the privacy mess.
I took a few a minutes to change my default settings but according to Facebook I am in the minority. However given the length of the new policy, I think it’s safe to predict that sooner rather than later someone will challenge Facebook’s new policy and sue them for Copyright infringement and/or Right of Publicity. And while Facebook claims that users acquiesce to the policy by using the service, as the policy gets longer and more complicated, Facebook’s ability to prove consent in court gets more and more difficult.
Till then I am, as Facebook put it when I changed the default setting, happy to decline the many benefits of the “New Facebook Experience.”