FTC Asked to Investigate Facebook’s New Privacy Changes
18 December 2009
We know that Facebook considers Twitter a threat to its web supremacy. We also know that the company’s been taking a lot of action to squash its upstart rival with an array of new features and changes that make it more like Twitter. The world’s largest social network took its biggest step yet towards its Twitterification when it asked its 350 million users to change their privacy settings. What concerned a lot of experts about the change was that the default privacy settings made some information and your status updates public information.There’s been a lot of ruckus about Facebook
being deceptive about the changes, but until now it’s just been ruckus. That changed today when a group of ten Internet privacy groups, led by the Electronic Privacy Information Center, filed a complaint with the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC), requesting an investigation into Facebook’s actions.The complaint is rather simple: Facebook didn’t provide adequate safeguards to protect privacy in last week’s update, changes that these privacy groups believe was illegal. The document has over 100 different points of arguments and contention to prove its assertions. Most of all, it argues that Facebook has made it more difficult, if not impossible, to have the same amount of privacy as before the changes.
We don’t really know how this FTC complaint will play out, we do understand why users are upset and why Facebook made these changes. The new privacy changes could prove to be huge for its business, especially for advertising, but it won’t do much good if the FTC starts making some noise.
