If you have checked your Facebook page today, then you have most likely been prompted to update your privacy settings for your page on the social site. A major overhaul of the Facebook privacy settings were in the works for sometime now, and founder Mark Zuckerberg discussed the changes last week in an open letter.
Although the decision to have all 350 million Facebook users make a mandatory change to their privacy settings is unprecedented, it is not the decision itself that I find potentially controversial. It is the fact that under the new privacy settings a number of personal facts about yourself will be made public, including your name, profile pic, and a number of other things.
Here is what CNET is reporting on it, “Some information–including name, profile picture, gender, current city, networks you belong to, friend lists, and pages you’re a fan of–will be available to everyone. The only way to keep that information from the general public is to not include it as part of your Facebook profile.”
Since Facebook’s birth you have always had the option to keep any and all of this information private if you wished to do so but that luxury is no longer available under the new settings. You do have the ability to keep the outlined information private but you have to remove it from your profile entirely, and who wants to do that?
