A False Sense of Privacy?
Earlier this week Facebook announced new, long awaited, privacy controls. The new controls are meant to try and salvage the social network’s declining image as a protector of privacy and silence the growing volumes of critics. The new features allow you to micro-manage which types of users may view what information. You can now configure your photo gallery to be available to friends of friends, your work history for close friends only, and your contact information invisible to anyone.
Perhaps most heralded was the ability for university students to allow only other students to view their profiles if they wished, essentially making it impossible for cases like the Ryerson student who was threatened with expulsion for having a Facebook study group.
The new feature sounds fantastic until you realize that there is nothing stopping anyone from changing their status from student to, alumni, or professor. So creating controls designed to lock out a specific user type become useless because anyone may choose to be any user type they so choose, and may change as many times as they wish, at any time.
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