Facebook users beware - as of this week Facebook have changed their privace settings to allow all of their members' posts, details and information to be publicly available by default. Why? Well, here is their explanation:

Every day, millions of people use Facebook to stay connected and share information with the people around them. When we first built Facebook five years ago, we thought hard about incorporating the best privacy settings for enabling people to share with the people they wanted.

Read the post here

The internet is buzzing with this, naturally, as it dupes the average user into sharing their whole life with the world if they have not read closely the privacy pop-up that now appears when you log in to Facebook this week. In my view, this is Facebook taking advantage of the fact that most computer users do not read closely social network policies, assuming that there will be nothing untoward or it would have been policed and corrected already.

So why the change? The message from Facebook is one of community cohesion across social networks, but this bypasses and clouds the true intention, which is that Facebook are now hotting up their war with Google, by indexing all content on their site to be shared with search engines. This would allow them enormous control of live-search results, but controlling what information is released to search engines, when, and at what price. It doesn't feel very community spirited now, does it?

But this goes further - check the radio buttons you are clicking: By not reading carefully which ones you check, you are also giving access to your friends details and posts, without their permission! This is in the small print of all Facebook 'games', and you can be unwittingly giving anyone access to this information about your friends and their profiles

Beyond my friends and clients, I don't see a need for the whole world to know about my Facebook profile, or to have it auctioned off.

I think I'll be visiting my privacy settings. You might want to do the same...

This blog catalogues developments both nationally and internationally in the way education and the internet co-exist. This is an interest of mine, but also to find a soapbox from which to shout abut some of the top quality resources and material that do exist across cyberspace.