Greg's Corner

Facebook screws up privacy…again

I’m sorry to have to bludgeon you over the head with the blunt end of Mark Zuckerberg again this week, but Facebook once again finds itself embroiled in yet another privacy gaffe. If I didn’t know any better, I’d swear that they were doing this on purpose now. However, instead of giving access to 300 million accounts or possibly allowing the Chinese government to have access to user information, this time they’ve only exposed 14 million users. While 14 million may seem like a drop in the bucket compared to 2 billion Facebook users, 14 million is 1.6 New York Cities or 24 Wyomings.

According to reports, Facebook developers accidentally caused a bug that changed the privacy settings of 14 million Facebook users. This means that if you changed your Facebook account to be private, or made a post that was only supposed to be shared among friends, Facebook may have changed those options to make the accounts or posts public ones. As is can be expected by now, Facebook’s response has been the usual of we’re sorry and this won’t happen again, until the next time it does.

One of the major causes of these privacy blunders is that Facebook has virtually no competition. While teens may be fleeing to YouTube in droves to get their social media fixes, Facebook still has an iron grip on the majority of social media users. It almost seems like Facebook’s general attitude toward privacy concerns are, that’s nice but where are you going to go once you leave Facebook? I’m afraid it’s going to take more than a mass exodus of users or government regulation to make Facebook start taking user privacy seriously.