Last night Facebook announced that they’re going to undertake a major overhaul of their Privacy Policy. And in my opinion, there are only two things we can all be sure of: 1) that it’s long overdue and 2) that people will be toasting the new Privacy Policy revisions with big mugs of steaming hot Haterade. The blog, posted Tuesday night, has already generated more than 17,000+ comments with mixed reactions as of this morning.
Facebook’s current privacy model uses Networks that include schools and companies. The model worked well when Facebook was smaller, Zuckerberg wrote.
“Over time people also asked us to add networks for companies and regions as well. Today we even have networks for some entire countries, like India and China. However, as Facebook has grown, some of these regional networks now have millions of members and we’ve concluded that this is no longer the best way for you to control your privacy,” he wrote. “Almost 50 percent of all Facebook users are members of regional networks, so this is an important issue for us. If we can build a better system, then more than 100 million people will have even more control of their information.”
Facebook’s new plan is to sack regional networks completely and create simpler privacy control and the ability to control who sees each individual piece of content users create or upload, according to Zuckerberg.
“We’re adding something that many of you have asked for — the ability to control who sees each individual piece of content you create or upload. In addition, we’ll also be fulfilling a request made by many of you to make the privacy settings page simpler by combining some settings. If you want to read more about this, we began discussing this plan back in July.” wrote Facebook’s founder Mark Zuckerberg in an open letter on the company’s blog.
Personally, I think that overall this change sounds like a good idea. The current privacy settings are clunky and in dire need of more elegant controls. But even though Facebook is free, many people feel that it belongs to them. I’m not sure if you remember, but there have been several huge revolts against Facebook’s privacy policy, the first being in September of 2006 when they introduced their News Feed.
Facebook’s userbase is a fickle bunch and often very hard to please. They’ve hated the redesign, changes to the Terms of Service and more. In fact there’s a (humorous) group called I AUTOMATICALLY HATE THE NEW FACEBOOK HOME PAGE. The group has over 21,000 members, not all of which are aware it’s a joke.
Here’s the group’s description:
I HATE CHANGE AND EVERYTHING ASSOCIATED WITH IT
I WANT EVERYTHING TO REMAIN STATIC THROUGHOUT MY ENTIRE LIFE
I DO NOT KNOW WHAT I WANT FROM THINGS I CANNOT CONTROL
BY LOGICAL DEDUCTION I AUTOMATICALLY OPPOSE THE NEW FACEBOOK STREAMING HOME PAGE
IF I HAVE TO EXPLAIN THIS GROUP IT IS NO LONGER FUNNY
It was created by a regular user, but perhaps funniest of all Facebook employees like Ivan Kirigin and Ari Steinberg have joined it — and even Mark Zuckerberg.
Will the new Privacy Policy and settings be all that we hope it will be? We’ll only be able to tell once we get our hands on it. But until then, some users are sure to hate on it.