Facebook Privacy: Just How Much Do Users Want?
It hasn’t been the best 10 days for Facebook. After instituting changes meant to improve user privacy, Facebook has been hit with a Federal Trade Commission (FTC) complaint alleging the social networking site did the exact opposite. According to a host of consumer and privacy groups, Facebook’s changes actually did more harm than good.
But just how much privacy do users really want? To hear Facebook tell it, only a small number of its 350 million-plus users were actually taking advantage of the privacy settings that existed before the changes were implemented.
"The mass of our users had never done anything at all," said Tim Sparapani, director of public policy at Facebook, in an interview with eWEEK Dec. 10. "Hundreds of millions of people had never stopped and thought about the consequences of sharing information. So we thought that it was important enough, as people who care about user privacy, to walk them through that process."
