Facebook Messages Going Public
You'll soon find the messages you post on Facebook when you do a Google search. That's right, the messages that you think are safe and sound on Facebook, only to be read by other Facebook users and only by your friends, will soon be read by anyone cruising Google, or any other search engine for that matter.
"One of the most anticipated days in the history of social networking site Facebook has finally come: the company announced today that it has begun making status messages, photos and videos visible to the public at large by default instead of being visible only to a user's approved friends." ~Marshall Kirkpatrick of ReadWriteWeb
What does this mean for Facebook and those of us who use it and expect it to keep us and our posts safe and private? Honestly, your posts were never safe and private, unless you have your profile set to "Private" and never ever post or comment to anyone else's profile that's not private. Anyone can come to Facebook and read your posts.
This is a little different in that now complete strangers can accidentally find your posts and read them. Do you really care what complete strangers think? It's my mom or my boss or my friends that I care about, not strangers. People that I know already know how to find me on Facebook. I don't see this making too big a difference to me.
What do you think?
It upsets me because that isn’t what I went to Facebook for. I went to enjoy a private community of my tight friends (not like mySpace) and share personal insights and details with them. I moved from blogging to this for the very reason of privacy and access. This means now that I have to adjust again, another level of privacy which was built in before. It isn’t the product I didn’t pay for
I’ll leave, reluctantly. I wanted to chat and share with certain friends; nothing weird or malicious, just not for public, or work, consumption.
As of today, previously private profiles are now partially public. I have tested this on a few people with private accounts (people I actually know and value in real life) and their photos, groups, apps and fan pages are all suddenly visible. I understand Facebook wanting to do battle with Twitter but to suddenly make peoples photos available to the public is just wrong. How many people are going to continue to upload thinking only their friends will see? Or what about those past photos that are now handed on a platter to anyone, the photos you assumed would be safe at the time?
Get on the horn and warn your friends to double check their privacy settings. I’m not sure but i think you can control what is public but you’ll have to fine tune your settings.
Let’s be careful out there…
You can absolutely control your privacy settings in Facebook. If you set your Facebook to private, your Facebook will not show up publicly, it’ll still be private. There will also be ways to set privacy settings for each post from what I hear.