Digital Smarts - The Changing Stance on Privacy At Facebook

The founder of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, once famously was quoted as saying that privacy was no longer a "social norm" in a society that seemed compelled to share everything. Since then Facebook has had a tricky relationship with privacy. The company often seems to have a very hard time understanding what users do and don’t want to share with particular people, or the whole world for that matter, and has made a number of faux pas by changing its privacy settings without letting users know that their pages were suddenly accessible by more groups of people. In June, Facebook began collecting  information from across the Web, rather than just within its network, to determine what kind of ads it should show users. Nearly all companies that rely on online advertising do this, but privacy advocates from the Trans Atlantic Consumer Dialogue -- a collection of consumer groups from the U.S. and Europe that focus on a number of social policy issues -- have argued that this dramatically increases the amount of data Facebook holds and that users were not properly notified about the change.

While that is being contested, Facebook is trying to clean up its act a bit. In April, there was another big push to better acquaint users with their privacy settings and make some settings more obvious. Also in April, Facebook made yet another change by allowing users to log in to outside apps such as Spotify or Flipboard without having to also share personal information from their profiles.  Zuckerberg now says that privacy is not about what users share with companies, but rather what users share with one another – meaning that Facebook can still collect what it wants about you, but it will “help” you be more careful about what you share with others. The truth is that the company is raking in hundreds of millions of dollars selling ads based on the user data it's harvesting. And regardless of how uncomfortable some users may be with what Facebook does with their data, they don't show any signs of slowing how much they share.