After battling against the Canadian Federal Privacy Commissioner and losing, you’d think that Facebook would have learned a thing or two about privacy. Over the weekend, the world’s largest social network with 900+ million users launched a new feature called “Find Friends Nearby,” which was made available on Android and iPhone devices.
Find Friends Nearby shows users which of their friends or even those that are not your friends are close to them in real time. The catch, both users must have the Find Friends Nearby feature turned on before Facebook makes their locations public. But of course, Facebook has turned this feature on by default (opps, privacy violation), so you have to find it buried in the app to turn it off. Or you can turn off your location on your phone altogether. They quickly killed the feature on Monday afternoon as a number of people and blogs complained (hmm, maybe they do listen to their user base).
Has Post-IPO Facebook Gotten Too Cocky?
Oh wait, after that disaster users started to notice that Facebook automatically replaced all user’s email addresses shown on their profile with the “@facebook.com” which they announced would be made available to users. So regardless of what you wanted, Facebook took it upon themselves to make this standard for everyone.
So Facebook, what are you going to throw in our faces today?
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