Many people are concerned by how much information Google have on them. Yet many of these same people share an incredible amount of information with their Facebook friends, and often with friends of their friends.
I use Facebook, and think it’s great. But I’m careful to the point of paranoia with what I share.
Like AdWords, many of Facebook’s defaults are not in your favour.
Yet what baffles me are the changes that Facebook get away with sneaking-in quietly.
The latest, as detailed on their developer blog, is sharing a user’s address and phone number.
While it’s true that the user will have to authorise this, you can probably guess how many people will click Allow, happy that what they’re doing makes sense.
You might think that this is reasonable. You might argue that if users choose to allow this information to be shared, then they alone are responsible for the consequences.
But if the Request for Permission had a large red exclamation mark, and said something along the lines of “WARNING: You are about to share your home address and mobile phone number with this website…“, don’t you think the opt-out rate would be much higher?
Sooner or later the critical masses (*) are going to realise the risks of what they’re playing with. And once they start to smell the poop, there’s no turning back.
* – remember you read that phrase first here!
