Monday, October 14, 2013

Facebook Welcomes Stalkers

I warned you. Now the time is nigh.
Facebook is dumping a feature that protects your privacy!
Facebook: helping you share more
ads with the people in your life...
The retirement of the "Who can look up your Timeline by name?" privacy setting means now anyone can find the profile of someone else through the search bar. People used to be able to make themselves disappear from the search functions, and hide their presence on the network to strangers, by modifying the setting.
Facebook says it's removing that setting (which controls whether users could be found when people type their name into the search bar), because only a single-digit percentage of the nearly 1.2 billion people on its network were using it. But it says users can still protect their privacy by limiting the audience for each thing they post about themselves.
Of course, being careful about what you post doesn't get rid of the fact that you can now be found on Facebook by anyone...stalkers or admirers alike!
As Facebook is an advertising-backed business whose revenue growth depends on its users (YOU!) sharing as much data as possible, the company's main motivation is to wipe out your user privacy over time. The removal of this search setting goes hand-in-hand with the expansion of Facebook's search feature, which people often use to find people they know - or wanna know - on the site. This will force more ad content to be readable by everyone, so more pages can be served up and more ad revenue generated.
Is that really what you joined Facebook for?

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