Facebook Privacy Changes

Privacy campaigners and civil liberties groups have criticised an update to Facebook users' profile settings, saying that it was pushing members to share personal information.

The changes, which were announced last week and are now rolling out across the site, asks users to review their privacy settings, and adjust them to ensure they are only sharing personal information, videos and photos with the people they want.

But privacy campaigners say this "transition tool" is "nudging" Facebook's 350 million users towards creating more open profiles, with details and information that can be viewed by anyone.

"Facebook is nudging the settings toward the 'disclose everything' position," said Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Centre in the United States. "That's not fair from the privacy perspective."

The changes mean that Facebook users will be able to decide how much their status updates, photos, videos and other personal data are shared with other Facebook users outside their network. It will also dictate whether any of this data is shared beyond Facebook, making it viewable across the broader web. In October, Facebook signed a deal with Microsoft's search engine, Bing, that would see public status updates included in Bing's search results to improve its real-time search capabilities.

Campaigners criticised Facebook for requiring that certain personal information, including a person's gender and the city they live in, is made publicly viewable to all, rather than just to friends. They also said that the layout of the transition tool – which would make all messages viewable to everyone, unless the user specifically chose to retain their current settings – was misleading.

"These new 'privacy' changes are clearly intended to push Facebook users to publicly share even more information than before," said a spokesman for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which campaigns for internet rights. "Even worse, the changes will actually reduce the amount of control that users have over some of their personal data."

But Facebook said that users could make some simple adjustments to their profiles – such as leaving the gender and city fields blank – to ensure that information was not publicly available. A spokesman for the social-networking site also said that with the new privacy settings, users could restrict who has access to a particular message or piece of content every time they post something to Facebook, making the recommended default setting less relevant.

"Any suggestion that we're trying to trick them into something would work against any goal that we have," said a Facebook spokesman. He said that Facebook was recommending that posts were viewable by all other users because such open sharing of information was consistent with "the way the world is moving".