Thursday, January 26, 2012

Consumers Unhappy About New Privacy Settings


Google signaled its intent to begin correlating data about its users' activities across all of its most popular services and across multiple devices. The goal: to deliver those richer behavior profiles to advertisers. Likewise, Facebook announced Tuesday it will soon make Timeline the new, more glitzy user interface for its service, mandatory.


Timeline is designed to chronologically assemble, automatically display and make globally accessible the preferences, acquaintances and activities for most of Facebook's 800 million members.



Google and Facebook have repeatedly insisted that the changes are intended strictly to improve users' experiences. "Facebook works the way it always has," says spokeswoman Meredith Chin. "There is no new information on Facebook as a result of Timeline, and no privacy settings have been changed with the introduction of it. It's simply an updated version of the profile."



Both Google and Facebook continue to be dominant in their market, but these two social media sites are under pressure to increase sales and profits, which are some reasons for these significant changes.



"What these unilateral decisions by Google and Facebook demonstrate is a complete disregard for their users' interests and concerns," says John Simpson, spokesman for Consumer Watchdong. "It's an uncommonly arrogant approach not usually seen in business, where these companies believe they can do whatever they want with our data, whenever and however they want to do it."

4 comments:

Morgan Wallace said...

I HATEEEE how sites keep changing. Timeline is confusing as it is...why add to the madness!?

Lauren Clark said...

I agree. I don't like how they continue to change the way we interact on facebook,however, they see every change as a good thing because it gives you a different way to use their product. Therefore, reaching out to more people. Also, as much as people hate when they make changes, most if not all people adapt because they are already so invested in facebook that they do not want to give it up.

JGusan said...

I love Timeline. I'm embracing the change.

Tess Jones said...

I don't like change. I understand moving forward, but I wish there was an option to leave something as is or update.