Facebook’s New Privacy Policy: Upsetting and Dangerous

According to Facebook, they will now be sharing the personal information of users in specific “pre-approved web sites”. The announcement has met the ire and criticism of many users, for good reason.

Facebook is ultimately a social networking website. Nobody signs on to Facebook in order to create a comprehensive web browsing experience. People simply log in so that they can connect with friends and family, share links, videos, images and the occasional poke. But nobody really wants Facebook to tell its partner site who they are, when they were born and who their friends are.

Simply put, such data is meant to be private, and if Facebook is not going to protect that privacy, then users might as well start turning every single piece of info they have into public. Despite Facebook’s assurance that the policy would only apply to specific websites, it does not make things any better. In fact, it is a complete betrayal of the trust that users have put into the site.

Even if the end user agreement page on Facebook does declare that the social networking site does have the right to use its data in the way that it is proposing that it would do, it is still unethical and something that Facebook would need to think over lest they feel like MySpace should make a comeback.

The saddest part about this is that the change might happen without many users understanding what is going on. Even worse, many users are still unfamiliar with the internet and are not yet aware of how “dangerous” having their account details logged into external sites can be. For now, many protesters are still trying hard to make other Facebook users of the major change.

Find out more about the change in the privacy policy of Facebook at Bernama.