Among the headline-grabbing stories in recent months has been
Facebook privacy. Facebook has emerged as a major online force, with between
400 million and 500 million members.
What put Facebook under the mainstream media’s halogen spotlight?
Without any pre-announcement, Facebook flipped private settings to public.
Facebook users cried foul, and the company’s founder apologized and began
backpedaling.
Making the private public was not such a good idea. Facebook introduced a
simplified control panel to make privacy settings easier and less complicated.
(If you want to check your privacy settings, from the Facebook page, select
“Account” and access the privacy controls. To fiddle with the controls, click
“Customize Settings.” Be sure to check the settings for applications and Web
sites. For a business, the application options make it possible for software
robots to tap into your Facebook information. My suggestion is to turn off
“Instant Personalization.” You can activate it if you find that it is important
to your business.) The new, simplified Facebook privacy controls are confusing
and complicated. Facebook wants to monetize its service, and the more public
information available translates to increased revenue opportunities.
In an interview with Larry Magid, a well-known journalist writing for the San
Jose Mercury News, Mark Zuckerberg,
Facebook’s founder, said: “There has been this rumor going around that’s completely not true, which is
that we give information to advertisers, and we don’t. … We don’t sell any
information, and we never will. … We’ve been working on these changes to our
privacy system for the last six months, but now we’re done. We’re not going to make
changes for a long time.” (Read the full interview here.)
What should a business do if it has a Facebook page? There are some basic steps
you can take. First, visit your company’s Facebook page and look at the
information displayed. If there is information that you do not want made
public, you may want to take a step back and make sure that policies and
procedures are in place to make a repeat event unlikely. Then once the policy
is in place, you can either delete or modify the information. Facebook is a
free service, and the type of customer support one expects when paying for a
business service is simply not available.
