It has been a year with Facebook and every moment I spent on it was cherishing. The platform is a great semi-formal environment to keep in touch with friends, colleagues and basically be socially active. There is a great downside though; privacy!
It is very hard to explain how complicated their privacy policy is - but the motive is simple: to make all content as much public as possible. The key to all major popular networking sites have been their privacy implementation; or rather lack of it.
So, what exactly is wrong?
- All the people I can share my professional and private life are already on my contact list. I do not want my profile to be listed anymore on the searches anywhere on the net. NOT POSSIBLE. Though I have set my privacy settings for "Public Search Results" as 'Do not allow', my profile is still listed in the site results.
- Why should two of my contacts who are completely unknown to each other should know what I'm commenting on each other's posts? (Yea, posts!! Not talking about links and photos yet. Hold on for that). If you think this information is inaccurate, let me tell you, every comment you make or receive, even on a simple text post, becomes one of your 'activities' - which are by default shared with all your contacts. THIS IS BAD. I can take extra precaution to protect my friend's post from getting exposed to other friends of mine by deleting the activity from my profile page; but I cannot expect the same from others; that's totally unfair.
- I want my photos to be shared only with my friends. NOT POSSIBLE - the moment someone comments on ANY of the photos, ALL of my photos, even from other albums, are exposed to practically everyone on the network.
- I want my data (Posts, Links, Events, Photos) to be exposed only to the people on my contact list - not a single level beyond that - no matter what. NOT POSSIBLE.
- And yea, I want my address book aka contact list to be confidential. I don't want to share that even with my friends. SIMPLY NOT POSSIBLE.
I understand, if not for all those restrictions, Facebook wouldn't have been so popular today. The way the privacy controls are designed on Facebook, they are way to complex and intentionally distributed across different views. As I said, "intentionally".
Most of the users wouldn't object sharing their Link posts (anyway public content) to friends-of-friends; but activities and photos cannot be taken for granted. What bothered me more from the very beginning was the privacy offered for my photos. I don't know how it work for others, but aren't photos supposed to be at the top of the privacy list? Yea yea, that's the spiciest content of all.
Ok, what's the alternative?
I guess, nothing. People are so addicted to Facebook and already fed up of hopping from one place to another. Even if I find an alternative, it would be unfair on my part to expect my contacts to follow me there. But I can't just sit here and do nothing about it when I feel cheated. In the first place, its my own content; let me decide who see it and who don't. I have enough of Facebook's stupid privacy policies. All my content should be available strictly for my friends and absolutely nothing should slip through to friends-of-friends. If you can't offer that for free, at least give me a paid option. I pay for my domain names, hosting, Yahoo! mail, Flickr and few other online things; so I definitely don't mind spending few more dollars to keep myself socially active.
All I want (I can take a little liberty here and speak for majority of users) from a social network is to keep in touch with friends, colleagues and other professional contacts; share information and let them know what's happening at this end. But that doesn't mean I wouldn't mind exposing my sister's personal life to my professional friends or even to my own friends, for that matter.
