Facebook Privacy: Tightening Up?

Facebook privacy has taken a step forward. Last week I wrote about Facebook Safety Tips, as privacy is becoming a key factor in the social networking world. Yesterday, Facebook announced that they would tighten up privacy in response to a set of recommendations made by the Canadian government (Facebook Privacy Announcement).

Here is the gist of the Facebook Privacy Changes that will be implemented in the next 12 months:

Facebook will simplify their privacy settings, consolidating them into a single interface to make it easier to access and modify. They are going to make protecting your private data more user-friendly.
Facebook will prompt users to review their privacy settings, rather than letting them sit, by default, unprotected (as is the case now)
Third-party Facebook applications or Facebook plug-ins (there are tens of thousands of them) will be required to comply with a new set of permissions, specifying the types of information they want to access from Facebook’s customer database. In other words, we will have the right to opt-in to information sharing rather than, by default, being opted-in.
End users (you and I) will have to give these third-party developers “Express consent” before our data and our friends’ data is made available to external applications.

But there are still concerns with Facebook’s Privacy settings – as they are making these changes, they are also opening up their platform to compete against the growing ranks of Twitter (which has a very open platform, meaning you can search on just about anything someone has written). Read more about Facebook’s Openness Trend.

John Sileo started taking privacy seriously after losing his business and more than $300,000 to identity theft and data breach. His clients include the Department of Defense, Pfizer and the FDIC. Learn more about Identity Theft Speaker John Sileo.