Facebook hits back at criticisms of privacy changes
The changes, which were implemented on Wednesday, allow users to apply more specific privacy settings to the content they post on the site. However, many of the default settings mean that unless users follow a prompt to go in and change their settings, they will end up sharing much of their information with everyone on the internet.
Privacy groups in the US have hit out at the move, claiming Facebook has pushed its members to downgrade their privacy settings under the banner of simplification. Facebook first announced the changes in July, while chief executive Mark Zuckerberg reiterated them in an open letter to users last week. Facebook has 350 million users worldwide with more than one million Irish members. Speaking on RTÉ radio yesterday, head of public policy and privacy for Facebook in Europe Richard Allan said the changes were offering people a choice as to what information they wanted to share.
“We wanted to make sure that the privacy options were front and centre... On many websites they are tucked away somewhere and we felt that as our website has grown, as we have developed very large networks, as people have used it very extensively, it was important that they made very active choices about the way they wanted to share their information,” he said. Mr Allan said the new settings had received a positive response among users and people could still easily control their level of privacy. “What users will see after the change is a little padlock. If they click the padlock, they can choose to share with everyone on the internet if they want to so that option is there, but they can also choose to share things with just friends or perhaps just members of their family or a subset of their friends,” he said.
Mr Allan also said the privacy settings were more stringent for children. “We’ve got some special controls in there that if you are under 18 and are using Facebook, if you share something and try to share it with everyone, we won’t let you... So for younger people, they are only sharing with people that they know and we think that’s very, very important for child safety,” he said.
