Why Facebook Is Its Own Worst Enemy

Currently, there is no federal law that requires a website to disclose whether or not it collects personally identifiable information about its visitors. The one significant exception is websites that collect personal information from children under thirteen.

By pushing the envelope on the collection, sharing, and use of personal information, popular social networking site Facebook may motivate Congress to pass legislation that would impose much more privacy regulation on websites and require disclosure on uses of personal information. Facebook has mutated from a service for private communication with your selected friends and colleagues to a social media network where certain information about you is shared with the public and with Facebook’s website partners - whether you like it or not. Kurt Opsahl of the Electronic Frontier Foundation gives the timeline of this Facebook transformation.

A significant part of the controversy is that many of the new Facebook features are “opt-out” rather than the consumer-protection-preferred “opt-in”. It doesn’t help that Facebook is not making it easy to opt out of the new features – requiring multiple clicks in multiple (sometimes less than intuitive) locations. The Washington Post’s Rob Pegoraro discusses the quirks of Facebook’s new privacy interface referring to it as “changing, confusing and sometimes outright cryptic”.

In response to Facebook and other sites with aggressive data sharing strategies, Congress has introduced a Privacy Bill which if passed would require all websites to inform people of the data they collect from their online visitors and how they use that data. For those who can’t wait for a legislative fix, Gina Trapani, Tech Writer and Web Developer, offers some helpful step-by-step guidance on opting out of the Facebook privacy settings.