Over the weekend, social networking giant Facebook ruffled a few feathers wehn it announced that it would begin sharing addresses and telephone numbers to application developers.
As expected, there was an immediate outcry and backlash.
So much that the social networking site has decided to suspend the sharing of such information–for now.
The site is promising that it will offer users more choices in the future on whether or not such information can and will be shared.
“On Friday, we expanded the information you are able to share with external websites and applications to include your address and mobile number. … Over the weekend, we got some useful feedback that we could make people more clearly aware of when they are granting access to this data. We agree, and we are making changes to help ensure you only share this information when you intend to do so. We’ll be working to launch these updates as soon as possible, and will be temporarily disabling this feature until those changes are ready,” wrote Facebook’s Douglas Purdy in a blog post today.
::facepalm::
Oh, Facebook. When will you get it through your collective thick skulls that your users don’t like it when you do this sort of thing? More importantly, why don’t you listen when said users repeatedly tell you that sharing things like people’s home addresses and phone numbers can quite literally put them in danger ?
I don’t know how many cases I’ve heard about where cyberstalking has turned into real-life stalking and even led to physical assaults, but the number is not zero. Now, granted, people really shouldn’t be putting that sort of information in such a public forum to begin with, but they do, and releasing it to other people they don’t know is not only a bad idea, it’s a pretty crappy business strategy.
What do you expect? Facebook is not in it for you, us or any other chartiy. They will make as much money as they can selling anything they can. THe onyl way to avoid this is to stay oof these stupid sites. They are mostly a waste of time.