Social Connections and Privacy
Sep. 3, 2011 at 03:29 PM | By Kate Malone | Comment Count
Each time Facebook releases a new feature, the blogs and tech reporters go nuts complaining about privacy. Facebook usually does nothing, users accept the changes and the cycle repeats itself. Most of the millennials I know have been dissatisfied with Facebook’s increasingly intrusive features. But I can count on one hand the number who have actually deactivated their accounts.
Earlier this week, ReadWriteWeb published a list of Facebook-wannabes. These are all social networking sites that have identified a problem with Facebook and created a site based around that concern. The biggest concern with Facebook is privacy, so many of these sites either give you increased privacy controls or are specific to a certain population subset (for example, CollegeOnly is just for— you guest it— college students).
But I predict that most, if not all, of these sites will fail. Yes, they will give users the control they say they want. But the reality is that people say they want more privacy than they actually do. As AdvertisingAge wrote recently, few consumers really care about their privacy enough to abandon Facebook. This has led to others asking, "If people don't care, is privacy really that important?"
The fact that Facebook maintains the largest user-base of any other social network shows that people value that outlet of connection more than they value control over their privacy. The new social networks propose to exchange all of your Facebook connections for privacy, but what’s the point of using them if your friends aren’t there? Facebook has a lot of power, mostly because it’s reached a critical mass. So many people are on it, that it’s near impossible to leave without severing ties to family and friends. And that’s why all of the people that claim to hate Facebook will never leave.