Facebook with all of its privacy ups and downs has what seems like taken a step in the right direction in realizing that everyone is not always sitting at a computer when accessing their site. We are a mobile society and privacy on our phones does or should matter as did we really ever think that if we accessed our Facebook profile from our phone, that our privacy settings would be different? I know I did not. I guess we should have as the laptop or desktop are confined within our network and our phone is not a part of that as it is on a public carriers' network. Hmh.
Facebook Privacy Goes Mobile
Privacy on Facebook has been a challenge as they want to be able to satisfy users with permission based access but at the same time, advertisers who need the information about the users. Advertisers pay, users do not. While this is not that cut and dry, Facebook was developed as a social permission based platform. Permission based where we allow with whom we connect and share information. Overall on platforms as a whole, our levels of what we accept to be shared has changed as we seek rankings on Google and in the next few months figure out how to recoup Yahoo rankings and Optimize for Bing but yet seek a bit of expectation that Facebook (in present day) that we are in control of our profile page. Stationary we able to opt out of what is shared but in the world of mobile we were not ... until now.
Facebook sees that we are not always in a stationary place at our desktop and laptops and has created mobile privacy so that you can control who can see the content you post to friends, friends of friends or everyone.
Is there an App for this?
No, there is not an app for this on the Iphone nor Android, just yet. Facebook has added the privacy settings via m.facebook.com/privacy to their mobile website which gives users the ability to set their privacy settings. It is yet to be determined if there will be an app created but mobile users are able to control their information sharing. As we have become accustomed to apps, it may not be long before an app is created but if the mobile site of Facebook prompts a privacy setting why would people download the app?
Privacy is a bit of a tricky issue. We want rankings and are on board with the real time results of our Tweets being published and more than likely would be with LinkedIn but Facebook is a different platform. It is a personal connection that has evolved into a business/brand connection. We are able to like and link or not a brand but we are not able to comment upon a friends' update without everyone else being able to have some access to us. Is this so private?
Did you realize that accessing your profile from your mobile device did not provide you with the same privacy settings as your own network (via desktop or laptop) profile?
photo credit: adz_dzikriii