Facebook, Google and privacy

Last week when I logged into Facebook, I saw a privacy dialog come up. Not having time to read the dialog, I clicked through, assuming that as I had not changed my security settings, that none would be made.

Guess what! Facebook has changed its privacy settings to default to profiles being visible to the public internet. Users now need to specifically tell Facebook to keep their profile private. This is a sneaky and underhand method by Facebook to expose more of its users' content to the public internet, increasing Facebook's search engine results. Facebook should have learnt from the last security uproar when it tried to change its Terms of Service to state that all users' content was owned by Facebook. Facebook fails to understand that one of the core reasons its users use it rather than MySpace is because of privacy reasons.

Along similar lines, Google's Eric Schmidt has stated that privacy should only be the concern of users that have something to hide.

It seems that George Orwell was right, privacy cannot be left in the hand of corporations or it will be abused. Please keep vigilant on this.