Social Marketing & Digital Agency

Having a murder attributed to your business must be a bit of a blow, but to have two in one week can only be described as a catastrophe.

What’s worse is that Facebook is getting lots of bad press for apparently not helping people, juveniles in particular, if they do fear that they are being ‘groomed’.

All this bad press follows hot on the heels of the fuss about the changes in privacy settings.  Which is a shame, because Facebook is fab – it’s great for personal things and a powerful tool for business.  But Facebook can’t seem to help blundering into these media quagmires (although it is fair to say that they can’t be held responsible for the psychotic tendencies of some of its members!)

What they could do however, is be more supportive when there are problems of abuse and bullying.  We’ve been approached by Facebook members and their parents who are having problems themselves and need our assistance as they have found Facebook to be spectacularly unhelpful.  And these aren’t trivial problems – they are cases of groups of people systematically picking on individuals in a fairly major way – serious enough for the Police to take notice, but not apparently for Facebook to do anything about.

So, Facebook, please try to be more helpful in helping your members, especially your younger ones, and then maybe the tabloids won’t give you such a hard time.

So Facebook’s recent changes to privacy settings are attracting lots of attention.  Unfortunately it’s of the wrong kind.

Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) along with nine other groups has filed a  complaint alleging that Facebook’s new privacy settings constitute an unfair and deceptive change in terms. The groups say that Facebook’s decision to institute the new controls violates users’ expectations and diminishes their privacy. The new settings classify a host of data as “publicly available information” — including users’ names, profile pictures, cities, networks, lists of friends and pages that people are fans of.

This complaint has led to the Federal Trade Commission taking an interest.  And to add insult to injury, ex-employees are coming out of the woodwork to say exactly what Facebook actually monitors – and it’s rather more than you might think.

Now wouldn’t you have thought, that an organization such as Facebook would have looked into the implications of change more carefully?

You can read all about it here.