What’s the difference between Facebook’s revised privacy settings and the old ones?
Under the revised privacy policy, Facebook now treats the following categories of personal data as “publicly available information:” • users’ names, • profile photos, • lists of friends, • pages they are fans of, • gender, • geographic regions, and • networks to which they belong. By default, Facebook discloses “publicly available information” to search engines, to Internet users whether or not they use Facebook, and others. According to Facebook, such information can be accessed by “every application and website, including those you have not connected with . . . .” Prior to these changes, only the following items were mandatorily “publicly available information:” • a user’s name and • a user’s network. Under the original privacy settings, users had a one-click option to prevent the disclosure of personal information to third party application developers. Under the revised privacy settings, this option is nonexistent.
