I’m going to the University of Florida next year and like all other high school seniors, I wanted to tell everyone about it. One of the ways I could do this and meet new people at UF was by joining my college’s Facebook network. The process of joining a new network (I hadn’t done this since freshman year of high school) was all pretty straightforward. Within a few minutes I received a verification link in an email and was part of the network. Only something seemed a little weird. When I clicked the link and was informed that I had joined the UF network, there was box towards the bottom of the page telling me that my privacy settings had changed. They’d gone from this:
to this:
Now every single person on the UF network could view virtually everything on my Facebook; things I only wanted my friends to see. Luckily for me I’d noticed this and changed it back but what about all the people who didn’t see that box? My contact info was also changed:
I’ve heard about the controversy over the new Facebook privacy rules, but I haven’t really looked into it. Now I’m really interested. What other applications/parts of Facebook can do this? I know some apps encourage it, like RoomBug, a roommate finder tool:
Up until this point I’ve been really cautious about what I’ve put on Facebook. Now I’m even more paranoid. It’s scary to think about the number of Facebook users that don’t know what other people can see about them. I wonder if any deaths/rapes have been the result of Facebook’s privacy settings. I also wonder if I still have the rights to all my photos…
Update: So random, crazy-psycho dude goes on Facebook, finds out random chick likes animals, takes advantage of this and kills her. I wonder if he discovered what her interests were through Facebook’s lack of privacy… http://www.elistmania.com/news/man_used_facebook_to_murder_teenage_girl/