Facebook Questions Can Broadcast Everything About You to Anyone
I’m not one to complain about Facebook being a massive boon to privacy. I’ve sat out many public upsets at Mark Zuckerberg while championing the culture of openness Facebook has created. Oddly enough, it ended up being a simple poll feature that finally pushed me into the creeped out zone.
Facebook questions have now been around for over a month, giving us time to play with them and see just how well they work. I’ve found it fun to answer them and create my own, watching how these arguments over opinion play out on my feed. What I didn’t realize was that Facebook was cataloguing all of my answers on my profile, making them available for anyone to see. Here’s what it says on Facebook’s Q&A page:
You should only ask and answer questions that you are comfortable sharing with everyone on Facebook as the questions you have participated in are visible to everyone.
This becomes extra disturbing when you look at your own questions tab. After just a month, they can become detailed indexes of your entire character, including political orientation, stance on smoking, particular consumer behavior and more. When you imagine marketers wanting to know information about their demographic, this would be their motherload. You can’t delete questions you’ve answered, so what you’ve already said is out there for everyone, forever – or at least until Facebook changes the settings.
Right now, answers are not given to search engines, meaning that targeted advertising across the general internet is probably not a consequence yet. But it certainly creates a well of information that Google would love to get its hands on. Let’s try to implement some privacy settings before that happens.