I was reading through some Facebook status updates and came upon an interesting one from an old high school classmate. It said, “Bill (not his real name) is Married.” Now, I don’t keep up with Bill, and I really had no idea of his marital status prior to his post. “Nice,” I thought…”Bill got married.” Curious, I read the comments. (Does that make me a voyeur? Or, is that the POINT of Facebook?)
Anyway, the few comments made it clear that Bill and his wife (who apparently have some kids) were going to make a go of their marriage, which had apparently been on the rocks. (I guess that would be “complicated” in FaceBook lingo.)
None of this would be all that interesting or topical for me, except Bill’s comment at the end of the messages congratulating him for sticking it out. He said, “Ya, we’re going to give it a go. Don’t tell anyone as I haven’t told my family yet. I didn’t realize Facebook was going to post it.”
Hmmm…Maybe not the best idea to announce your “status” on a social network if you want your friends and family to know first. Why didn’t Bill realize that Facebook was going to announce his status to the world? Or, at the very least, that it was not going to be “their little secret?”
I was thinking about this in light of the buzz about Facebook founder, Mark Zuckerberg’s recent comments about privacy. In an apparent about-face on the subject, he indicated that today’s consumer is not as interested in privacy as in the past. PC World quoted him:
“People have really gotten comfortable not only sharing more information and different kinds, but more openly and with more people. That social norm is just something that’s evolved over time,” Zuckerberg said. “We view it as our role in the system to constantly be innovating and be updating what our system is to reflect what the current social norms are.” Zuckerberg then pointed to Facebook’s recent privacy policy change that made user’s key information open by default as an example of the social network’s willingness to reflect “current social norms.”
For those unfamiliar with the recent changes, Facebook recently changed settings to allow your name, profile picture, gender, current city, networks, friends list, and all the pages you subscribe to to be publicly available information on Facebook. What does this mean to you? Everyone on the web can see it; it is searchable. (Yes, that means Google can come looking for you.)
Making the default “public” is kind of like when you sign up for anything and the default is to subscribe to their newsletter and learn more information – not taking action is so much easier, many businesses get subscribers who had not intended to hear from them ever again. By the same token, if you’re not paying a lot of attention and being vigilant, you may be sharing more than you intend to online.
And, if you are my old high school friend, you are sharing because it feels natural, only later realizing the ramifications. Think about it…If you are who Google thinks you are, you need to step up and make sure you actively manage what it sees and knows.
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photo by Bill Gracey
