Facebook recently announced its new privacy enhancements that may just make our information less private. Although there are new controls that allow you to limit who sees your personal information, posts, photos, etc., the change that’s causing blow back is due to a new category, called “publicly available information,” that is beyond users’ control. This new category includes a person’s name, picture and city, the list of their Facebook friends and the Facebook pages they have endorsed. As a recent LA Times editorial observed, “The friends list is particularly sensitive, privacy advocates note, because of the amount of personal information that can be gleaned from knowing a person’s associates.”
Why did Facebook do this? According to the LA Times, it’s simply good business. For them, not necessarily for you. Read the Op-ed piece here.