“Facebook has gone rogue,” said Ryan Singel in Wired.com. The world’s largest social-networking site has been steadily reneging on its privacy promises, sharing the personal information of its 400 million users with marketers. Recently, it announced a new innovation in which “partner” websites will have access to Facebook profiles and such information as “the city that you live in, your name, your photo, the names of your friends, and the causes you’ve signed onto.” All of that is, in effect, now automatically public. In theory, users can opt out of being so exposed, but Facebook’s 5,800-word privacy policy is longer than the U.S. Constitution, “maddeningly complex,” and constantly changing. But a backlash has begun, said Samuel Goldsmith in the New York Daily News. Some influential tech bloggers announced last week that they’ve closed their Facebook accounts and protesters have scheduled May 31 as “Quit Facebook Day.” This time, the 6-year-old Web phenom may have gone too far.
The howls of protest are “understandable,’’ said Henry Blodget in BusinessInsider.com, but don’t expect any major change in policy. Facebook’s steady erosion of privacy has been the key to the company’s staggering success. Think about it: The company’s 26-year-old CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, has pioneered “an entirely new kind of service,” unseen in human history, in which hundreds of millions of people are connected in an intimate way, sharing information and e-mails and photos in real time, making new contacts, and rapidly erasing “the fine line between public and private.” People “freak out” every time that line gets fainter, but then they adjust—because they truly like to share their preferences and thoughts, and to hear what other people like and think. Its rivals would love “to see it get scared and conservative,” but this backlash, too, will pass.
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