As people become increasingly prepared to post personal information about themselves on social networking sites, is privacy online becoming a thing of the past?

One of the most popular sites, Facebook, recently changed the way its privacy settings operate. Users have been greeted with a notification, asking them to update their privacy settings.

The new privacy policy recommends default settings for users to share their Facebook content such as status updates, thereby making more information automatically public unless users specify otherwise. Although users can opt to keep their previous settings, some industry commentators worry that many will simply accept Facebook’s recommendations.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation for example, has said that it considers that the changes are intended to encourage users to publicly share even more information than before, so increasing the traffic and visibility of activity on the site and creating more privacy concerns.

The founder of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, posted an open letter prior to the changes, preparing users for them and noting that controls had been built in to protect privacy.

He also recently defended the move, commenting that privacy was no longer a social norm and has evolved over time, with people now being comfortable to openly share more information with more people. Facebook’s new privacy settings were said to simply be in line with these new social norms.

Head of Commercial, Luisa D’Alessandro comments, “It is interesting that as time has gone on, people seem to be more and more willing to disclose personal information about themselves. Yet again, this raises the issue of data protection for Internet users, and the considerations which go along with sharing personal information online. With the trend moving towards more information being made public, people really need to think about what information they are providing and ensure that their privacy settings and the instructions they give about data uses, are in line with their intentions and expectations.”

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