Should Facebook's New Privacy Features Concern You?

Facebook has changed the rules again. Should you be concerned?

On December 9 Facebook rolled out a new feature that was previously announced via an open letter from Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. This feature asked users to review their privacy settings to give them more control over who can view the content they publish on the popular social networking site. This change has upset some of Facebook’s users because they see this as an effort by Facebook to get users to make public more of the information that they post. Further, that information will be indexable by search engines such as Bing, which has announced that it will allow searches of status updates posted to Facebook and Twitter. This is a big change for most users, whose current settings may be restricted to family, friends, or groups they’ve joined.

Should users be worried? That depends on what type of information is being posted. Regardless of the privacy policies or the amount of data available to search engines or other users, the ultimate arbiter of what is posted and shared is each user. The service is called social networking for a reason.

Here’s the point: Although users do need to make sure they are aware of the privacy policies of the sites they enjoy and how that information might be used by others, ultimately the users themselves control what is posted online and what applications are installed in their profiles.

If you do not want to share information, do not post it. Once your data gets picked up by search engines, it’s virtually impossible to have it removed. It becomes part of your online brand forever.