Ways for Facebook to Improve User Privacy

Online privacy advocates are always one step behind social networking sites like Facebook.Com. This time, we have some extra addition to the whole crowd because recently, Senators Michael Bennet, Mark Begich and Al Franken (All of them – Democrats) are having objection against the Instant Personalization feature of Facebook.

Instant Personalization is a small plugin/service on Facebook which lets partner websites, personalize some things on any individual’s profile page, according to his or her tastes. It could be the new genre in music, new movies or something related to fashion, but 3rd party sites can easily dig into your profile and set your page according to your set of choices.
Opt-out, not opt- in
You can actually opt out of the Instant Personalization option if you don’t feel like being part of something you’re not comfortable with but there’s a small catch to it. The Opt Out feature is buried deep within a lot of Privacy Setting pages and there’s no way for someone new, to find this out. Even users, who have been using Facebook for years, had trouble finding it. So I think those Senators were right about this thing.
Be upfront about changes or rewrites
Facebook wasn’t pretty clear about the new changes it made to its Privacy Policies and Terms of Agreement. But still, Facebook should have been open about those changes and some users actually DO read all those sugar coated words in a website’s Terms of Agreement pages.
Stop being vague
Facebook just likes to talk about things in vague terms (which shouldn’t be like that) and instead of being unclear about things, it’d be better for Facebook to open up.
Let me control information access
Users are supposed to have more sense of control over what information, outside websites are accessing so easily. I can understand if someone wants to know about my name, sex, age or vice versa, but considering this thing that your profile is literally a cess pool of homage to other websites, that can track your choices through – walls, scraps, posts, status messages and everything, is just a little too creepy.