The result? Facebook’s 800 million members are left questioning their privacy rights once more.
Regular users of the site don’t really care about or take in the detail of each Facebook privacy gaffe, but all this almost routine backtracking does is add to the growing suspicion people have about what’s happening to the huge amounts of personal information they are loading onto the largest social network in the world every day.
Up until now, whenever Facebook has innovated or changed anything on the site with regards to privacy settings, it has made the alterations and then waited to see how the users react – not the other way around.
Consequently, one of the most striking aspects of the FTC ruling is that moving forward, Facebook will be required to obtain consent from its users ahead of making any changes to users’ privacy settings.
Zuckerberg has done an unbelievably amazing job of making a large proportion of the world change its attitude to privacy. The way that Facebook has evolved has fundamentally changed the way people share information with their friends and what they continue to consider ‘private’.
We have all become ‘broadcasters’ reporting avidly on our lives to our own network. Of course Facebook hasn’t made these societal changes alone. Sites such as MySpace and Friends Reunited paved the way first. And the creation of Twitter single-handedly facilitated free-flowing real-time information – which then became a central part of Facebook in the form of the ‘status update’.
Zuckerberg and his team, through furiously altering privacy settings and creating new features at an amazing pace, without coming up for air, have created a world-leading platform; a web within the web and redefined the internet from a place centred around finding information, to one dedicated to social.
As with all great innovators, Zuckerberg, through continually pushing the privacy boundaries, has created solutions to problems we didn’t know we had yet.
We didn’t know that we wanted to share photos, tag people in locations and read our friends’ lives in the form of a daily newspaper (read ‘News Feed’) until Facebook created it.
However, now that Facebook is forced to obtain consent from its users ahead of making these behaviour-altering changes, can it continue to lead where others can’t even follow?
How will the consultation with 800 million members even work? Most people hate change. We are creatures of habit. If Zuckerberg had to consult Facebook’s users about the creation of the News Feed, it would never have got through – as people really didn’t like it - until enough time elapsed for them to realise why it enhanced the site, not hindered it.
Zuckerberg has always innovated first and apologised later. That strategy seems to have worked extremely well for Facebook, until now.
For once Zuckerberg may have to ask permission first. What remains to be seen, is whether Facebook users will trust his vision.
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