Marilyn Thipthorpe
Facebook privacy is a source of everlasting fear to many. Your profile does come with some extensive settings but most are limited. Facebook says that if you don’t want someone to see what you’re sharing- hey don’t share it! Or you could select the audience you share your posts with. It’s about being picky with your friends or better still Facebook’s option of classifying friends as acquaintances. This is option is available whenever you click on your friends profile, tap the friends button and voila! You’re presented with a box that allows you to edit your friends list. You can them put them into categories of your choice. So the next time you post something ‘unwanted’, click the ‘who should see this’ button, then select from a variety of choices.
You can also use the first shortcut (friends’ button) to put your trusted ones into a close friends list. This list goes further with a ‘trusted ‘contacts’ option, that allows you to add friends who can retrieve your information if ever lost. Be careful though, you never know when you might have fight!
But is this really enough? Just limiting friends, putting them into groups or even browsing through the minimalist security setting will never be enough until you are in full control of what is shared.
Various rights groups as well as governments have raised their voices against Facebook, to little or no avail. The EU’s warning echoes the voices of people all over: Facebook’s privacy setting is out of control. According to certain humorous meme’s people who like Facebook’s privacy policy fall into 3 groups: They *believe their lives are incredibly fascinating * are too busy playing games to notice *are Donald Trump! That seems pretty accurate to me.
Facebook has retorted to these various arguments by simple stating that joining Facebook is a conscious choice. People step forward of their own volition, to connect and share their life experiences. Facebook studies user activity in order to enrich the user experience.
It is due to this reason that certain aspects of a profile are always open, such as name, profile picture and your user ID number. Facebook further announces that a profile without a picture is a less satisfying experience, furthermore if you are not comfortable sharing your thoughts, then just don’t post them.
Well if that’s not complicated I don’t know what is. In short if you want to get real close to Facebook’s privacy setting, you’ll need to navigate through 50 settings with more than 170 options or read their policy which contains 5,830 words, does anyone really have the time or patience to do that!