Are Facebook bosses trying to trick us?

If you've logged into Facebook in the last 24 hours you will have noticed that the social networking site has changed its privacy settings. The move, which could dramatically increase the amount of personal information people display online, has outraged digital rights groups and civil liberties campaigners.

The changes make more information, photos and videos visible to everybody on the
web unless you specifically edit the settings yourself - status updates can now
also be picked up by search engines.

The pop-up message that greets members asking them to change their privacy settings
appears to be different depending on how engaged that person was with Facebook.
We would urge all members to log on and double-check their privacy settings
now, if they haven't already done so.

Facebook said the changes, which were introduced on 9th December, help
members manage updates they want to share, not to trick them into revealing
more information than they are comfortable with.

So why then are status updates now automatically made public unless specified
otherwise by the user?

"These new 'privacy' changes are clearly intended to push Facebook users to publicly share even more information than before," said Kevin Bankston, a senior attorney with the
Electronic Frontier Foundation. "Even worse, the changes will actually
reduce the amount of control that users have over some of their personal
data."

Facebook began testing the privacy changes during mid-2009 before
introducing them site-wide. The changes let people decide who should see
updates, whether all 350 million Facebook members should see them, and if they
should be viewable across the web.

Barry Schnitt, a Facebook spokesman, said users could avoid revealing
some information to non-friends by leaving gender and location fields blank.
Any suggestion that we're trying to trick them into something would work
against any goal that we have," said Mr Schnitt.

Facebook is encouraging users to share their updates because, he said,
that was in line with "the way the world is moving". But the
important differentiator is that these changes are more in line with how
Facebook wants the world to move forward, not necessarily how its users want
the world to move forward.

As blogger Marshall Kirkpatrick said, this is not what Facebook users
signed up for. This issue isn't about privacy for Facebook, it's about
increasing traffic and the visibility of activity on the site.

Many users have left comments on the official Facebook blog criticising
the changes.