What You Actually Need To Know About The Changes Facebook Is Making To Its Privacy PolicyPost title

Many Facebook users are frantically posting a “copyright protection notice” on their Walls to try to keep Facebook from violating their privacy by copying, disseminating, sharing, leaking, licking, scratching, biting, or clawing the contents of their Facebook accounts. It’s complete legal mumbo jumbo that’s not

enforceable or binding on Facebook, as pointed out by my colleagues Dave Thier and Jeff Bercovici. It’s not the first time the notice has gone viral; it seems to have been spurred this time though by changes to the agreement that is binding on Facebook when it comes to your privacy: the site’s privacy policy, which Facebook likes to call the “Data Use Policy” (in acknowledgement perhaps of the fact that privacy policies don’t exist to protect your privacy but to explain the ways in which it will be violated).

Facebook sent out notice about the changes near midnight East Coast time the night before Thanksgiving — the kind of timing most companies would use to drop bad news, knowing most people are too busy traveling, salivating, or silently suffering through awkward family time to pay attention. That caused some people to freak out, assuming Facebook was changing the policy to retain rights to all your photos  as well as your eternal soul.

It’s hard to blame those naive Facebook users desperately posting this notice to their wall in hopes of putting some kind of legal fence around their drunken party pics. Even the experts are confused by Facebook’s privacy policy changes. Mathew Ingram, a tech writer I hold in high esteem, told his readers that the most recent changes to the privacy policy paves the way for Facebook to create ads that follow you around the Web. As evidence, he cites a post I wrote… six months ago. Yeah, you gave Facebook the right to use your info to create an external ad network last summer. That’s old news! Here’s what you need to know about the most recent set of proposed changes:

1. There’s a handy-dandy redlined version of the new policy here. One of the biggest changes is that Facebook isn’t going to let you vote anymore on changes to its policy. Facebook was trying this whole democracy thing, letting its community decide whether or not it should make changes to the agreements between the social-networking site and its users. The problem: voter apathy. During their June vote, only 342,632 people participated. That’s a miniscule fraction of their now one-billion strong user base, and thus nearly meaningless. So Facebook’s pulling the plug on democracy, instead having a substantive “comment period” and making its privacy czar Erin Egan available to answer questions. 

2. Facebook is adding a clause to the data use policy that allows it to share “information with affiliates,” i.e. other companies that Facebook owns. Bloomberg calls the moveGoogle-like, pointing out that it will allow Facebook “to build unified profiles of its users that include people’s personal data from its social network and from Instagram.” I think it’s less like Google mashing up everything it knows about a person in one basket and more like a typical corporate clause. But it does mean that Facebook and Instagram info may now exist on the same server and won’t be kept separate, meaning the social networking can now see everything it knows about you through a Walden filter.

“As our company grows, we acquire businesses that become a legal part of our organization,” says a Facebook spokesperson. “We wanted to clarify that we will share information with our affiliates and vice versa, both to help improve our services and theirs, and to take advantage of storage efficiencies.”

3. Facebook is making some changes to your ability to block people from sending you private messages. They’re removing a clause that said, “You can control who can start a message thread with you using your ‘How You Connect’ settings.” But Facebook says it’s not totally taking away your ability to block your ex from harassing you via private message.

“We are working on updates to Facebook Messages and have made this change in our Data Use Policy in order to allow for improvements to the product,” says a Facebook spokesperson. “You will still be able to block senders and manage which messages you see in your inbox.”

source: forbes.com

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