The following is an excerpt from Jason Calacanis's newest email about the recent change in Facebook TOS. If you are a FB user, you may want to read it.
In this case, if you simply click through the windows you've exposed all of your private Facebook information, including comments, friends, pictures and status updates, to "everyone." In other words clicking through changes everything in Facebook terms--unlike every other license or update screen you've experienced in your life. I'm sorry, what the frack just happened? I turned over my friend list, photos and status updates to everyone in the world? Why on earth would anyone do that with their Facebook page? The entire purpose of Facebook since inception has been to share your information with a small group of people in your private network. Everyone knows that and everyone expects that. In fact, Facebook's success is largely based on the face that people feel save putting their private information on Facebook. When you do get to the second page a series of confusing radio buttons default--yes defaults--to giving everyone access to your social graph. Wow. I've been using the internet since before images were supported. I've been a member of every social network since Six Degrees and Ryze, almost a decade before Facebook became available to the public, and I was confused by their settings page. An average user, certainly, has no idea what is going on by these changes. So why is Facebook trying to trick their users? Simple: search results. Facebook is trying to dupe hundreds of millions of users they've spent years attracting into exposing their data for Facebook's personal gain: pageviews. Yes, Facebook is tricking us into exposing all our items so that those personal items get indexed in search engines--including Facebook's--in order to drive more traffic to Facebook. ************************************************************************* ** List info, subscription management, list rules, archives, privacy ** ** policy, calmness, a member map, and more at http://www.cguys.org/ ** *************************************************************************
