Facebook's New Oversharing Tool Will Heighten Awareness of Privacy
Woke up this morning to find the Twitterization of Facebook continues — with the announcement that it was allowing us all to share our status updates with everyone. Not just everyone within Facebook, but everyone, as in members of the human race.
Is this a mind-blowing, game-changing moment? Actually, no. But it is an important signpost in the annals of the too-much-information age. My belief is that, while, on the one hand, this does allow all of us to make more information available to whomever, on the other hand, it will increase everyone’s awareness, that perhaps we don’t want to share our information with everyone. Maybe clicking on “Privacy Settings” will become more popular.
This latest Facebook news actually tracks back to a privacy panel on Tuesday at OMMA Social, which, partly because there was someone wiling to play the role of enemy combatant, made for the most raucous panel of the day. The enemy combatant, Mike Germano, co-founder of the Brooklyn-based digital agency CarrotCreative, maintained that no one really cares about privacy settings, or at least no one in his generation. He said: “I graduated college in 2005 and my generation is not hung up on the control issues of social media.”
True, but as someone who graduated college, um, several decades before, I’d argue it will become more an age-related issue than a generational one. People who graduated from college recently often don’t realize how much they have to lose, mostly because, frankly, they have much less to lose than those of us who’ve graduated to kids, mortgages and carefully built professional reputations. With Facebook making it possible to share everything with everyone, the awareness of keeping some things private, will, for some of us, be heightened.
I’ve noticed this on Facebook, long before today. While I must admit to being somewhat lax about my own privacy settings (I choose instead, to be judicious on what I share as a general rule), those of my generation, and age, generally seem to want more control of their settings. Younger people and people deep into social media don’t seem to share the concern. In fact, another reason why Facebook’s moves today aren’t game-changing is that, for many power users of Facebook, this new feature is effectively moot; they already use Twitter as their default status update provider, so have been oversharing for a long time. (Picture courtesy of Inside Facebook.)
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Catharine P. Taylor has been covering digital media and advertising for almost 15 years and is a frequent speaker at conferences about media and advertising. She posts daily to BNET Media, writes the weekly Social Media Insider column for Mediapost and also has her own advertising blog, Adverganza.com. Follow her on Twitter or subscribe to the BNET Media Twitter feed.
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