By K. A. Laity
The news slipped in while many of you were sleeping: Facebook made more and significant changes to your privacy settings. Yes, it's a whole new set of alterations that you will have to go in and manually address unless you don't care one way or the other about who can read what you put on the social media network.
Why are they doing this? ReadWriteWeb has suggested that despite their protestations about "increasing a user's control over their privacy" or, as Leah Pearlman, Facebook Product Manager, claimed, "it's hard for people to tell the difference between users with similar names when looking for their friends. More publicly shared information would make your friends with common names easier to identify," that the real answer is they're worried about Twitter.
Really? As they point out,
Facebook is so much bigger than Twitter! One report, admittedly six months ago, estimated that at current growth rates it would take 36 years for Twitter to pass Facebook in number of users and said that right now Facebook grows a Twitter's-worth of users every eight days!
And, yes, Twitter is not Facebook and vice versa.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation carefully dissects "The Good, The Bad and The Ugly" about the changes, including the extrapolated effects, such as:
In addition to potentially revealing intimate facts about your sexuality — or your politics, or your religion — this change also greatly reduces Facebook's utility as a tool for political dissent.
Serious allegations indeed, but I suspect this latest and most sweeping change to privacy settings will generate the least amount of outcry. I say this because the Facebook team seems to have been training users to get used to this kind of change. The first round of alterations to privacy policies generated a huge backlash and protest; Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg had to ameliorate the outrage personally and backtrack. Their sheepish press releases made clear what a fiasco it had been.
They've been more careful since then, adding successive changes in smaller doses, testing the waters and gauging reactions. Users have become so accustomed to the changes that when the latest round appeared and were protested (sigh, yes, usually by joining Facebook groups to protest them), there were probably just as many humorous groups spoofing the 50,000 Strong Against [fill in the blank with variations on why we were so annoyed with Facebook that we started a Facebook group just to, uh, show, uh, Facebook]. There's even a group called "150,000,000,000,000,000,00000000000000 people against everything" which would delight Groucho's Professor Wagstaff.
So I suspect the backlash will be fairly small. People will shrug and ignore the changes or sigh and alter the default choices, but they won't stand up and march out of the room. It's rather like the end of the brilliant but little seen satire The Rise and Rise of Michael Rimmer where an exhausted public, quizzed on every single government decision, votes in a smooth dictator [played with smug brio by the inimitable Peter Cook with palpable relief.
It seems, as Neil Postman suggested a while back, it was Huxley who was right and not so much Orwell and we will be undone not by our fascist enemies, but by our own sloth. I'd do something about that, but I have to go see what's shaking on Twitter.
Image via Kiko's House