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Facebook Announces Important Changes To Its Policies
Facebook has recently announced some major changes dealing with the handling of user data. The company has said that it will now look at freely sharing user data with the affiliate companies that it owns. You will realize that they are talking about Instagram. After acquisition, Facebook has not really integrated Instagram into its own service even though there have been some efforts to get image filters to Facebook’s mobile apps. Other changes include cancellation of user vote against its new deployments and policies and removal of restrictions on unknown persons contacting a user on Facebook.
All of these proposed changes are pretty significant and have a lot of people wondering about the drastic steps they entail. Let us focus on each one of them.
1. Sharing of user data between affiliates:
The logic behind this move might be to unify both the services without having to physically integrate them. If you have a Facebook and an Instagram account, your data will be unified across them. You will however, be able to use both the services independently. Both Instagram and Facebook generate impossible amounts of user data and making sense of the data would be easier if they were unified. Instagram doesn’t make any revenue yet but this new move would help Facebook make the process of targeting users easier for the advertisers on its platform, thus making Facebook some good revenue. The major concern with this move is the potential danger arising from keeping all data in one basket. There is just way too much information about a user present on the social network. A similar argument was made against Google’s Unified Privacy Policy many months back.
2. Cancellation of User vote:
What user vote?! I don’t remember voting!
Yes, this is a user vote with a difference. Whenever Facebook deployed a change in features, design or policy, the amount of people commenting/talking about this change would result in a vote. According to newly released data from Facebook, a vote was triggered if 7000 users were commenting negatively about the new deployment. In order for a rollback of the new deployments, 30% of the total Facebook users would have to vote against it. Facebook is doing away with this system completely because it believes that this voting process gives more weight to quantitative comments rather than quality feedback. In this regard, Facebook has announced that they will hold webcasts with Chief Privacy Officer Erin Egan. This will be a two-way exchange and user will be able to direct their questions to Erin, which she will then address.
3. Contacting Users On Facebook:
Facebook’s current privacy controls allow users to set very rigid contact rules. Facebook doesn’t want this to happen. It wants everyone to be able to contact everyone. However, this will inevitably give rise to spam, harassing emails and the like. Facebook is aware of this and will introduce filters in the Facebook email offering so that they can reduce all the untoward activities that might arise. I, personally think that this is a very wrong move. Giving contact control in the hands of its users is logical because it depends on the user whether they want unknown people to contact them or not. People who do want others to contact them will put no restrictions. The problem is already solved. Why go ahead and mess it up further? Obviously, this has got to do something with the marketing & advertising aspects of Facebook’s business.
What are your thoughts on these changes? Do you agree or disagree? Share your views with us.
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2012-11-22 09:40:16
Source: http://www.watblog.com/2012/11/22/facebook-announces-important-changes-to-its-policies/
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