Facebook is most definitely a pioneer in online privacy, but I think they need to step things up a notch.
For example, let's take this from a business perspective (even though a lot of PR people are saying that Facebook shouldn't be used for such purposes). So let's say that one of the people you work with (let's say a journalist) inevitably finds you and adds you at some point (unless of course you value your online privacy so much that you don't even let your profile appear in any kind of search results) - and you don't really want to accept their request as you have a lot of personal stuff you don't want any of them seeing. Are you seriously going to ignore the request and hope they just forget about it, or start bulking up on privacy settings? The latter obviously sounds right, but here are the three things I think are still missing in order to get everything right:
- photos and videos you've been tagged in: right now, if you don't want a group of people to see a few specific photos you've been tagged in (we're not referring to the whole album here), you can't do it - you have to block them out of the entire "tagged photos" album
- links you post to your wall: right now there's only a general setting for everything (covering status updates, links, notes, photos, videos)
- item-by-item privacy: right now you can choose who sees what you post when you post it, but you can't go back and modify it
I guess that what I'm saying is Facebook started off in the right direction (OK, they pretty much set the rules) and now they just need to work on some of the details.
I'm also saying that a lot of people still really need to work through their Facebook privacy settings before showcasing (sometimes very) inappropriate content to their business contacts.
