Facebook is one of the largest and most popular social networking websites having more than 350 million active users worldwide. Mark Zuckerberg created Facebook in his Harvard dorm room.
Recently Facebook and ‘king of search’ - Google signed a deal where Google can display real-time results of public content from Facebook fan pages. It means that over 1.6 million active Facebook fan pages can now appear in Google as a search result. For example – If a person is searching for ‘Best real estate deals in California’ and you have recently updated your Facebook page writing ’10 best real estate deals’, then there are chances that you might get a customer instantly. This deal opened the gateway to a more efficient SEO. Hence, it is a great time to create a Facebook fan page and help your business grow.
‘Google-Facebook’ deal has led some privacy setting changes which have created innumerous controversies and criticism among Facebook users. After the revamped privacy settings users have less control over their personal data and their information including private photos is also publicly available. This has annoyed many Facebook users and they have poured their negative comments on various blog sites. They demanded the old privacy settings back and posted comments that they want to deactivate their Facebook accounts.
To summarize all let us discuss the advantages and disadvantages of the changed privacy settings by Facebook.
Advantages:
• Updates in Facebook page can appear as a Google search result which will help a business gain customers.
• Increased online presence.
• Finding people and connecting with them will be much easier.
Disadvantages:
• Personal information such as gender, date of birth, photos, etc is publicly available.
• Less control over private information.
• Enemies can find you easily.
• Increased opportunities for Cybercrime.
This is not the first time that Facebook has been criticized for changes. They have been questioned many times for their confusing privacy settings. However, the best part of Facebook is no matter whatever changes they make or how many users get annoyed, it is among the top-visited social networking websites with ever increasing number of users. Social Networking Forecast for 2010 predicts that Facebook will still top the list and will have over 500 million users worldwide till the end of 2010.
For more information on Privacy Policy and Settings you can visit the following websites:
http://www.facebook.com/policy.php
http://www.allfacebook.com/2009/02/facebook-privacy/
- Brian Kingsley, Director of Technical Services, ACS Services, Boston
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment