After watching Facebook make so many missteps when it comes to privacy over the past couple of years, including how some leading game developers passed along user data to marketers, I've come to the conclusion it should just throw in the towel.
Forget about tweaking privacy settings so they're easier to control, manipulate, configure or understand. Forget about having to worry if new services make more personal data public so that search engines can discover it so Facebook can serve up more pages to display more ads. Forget privacy settings altogether.
Facebook should just make everything public. Anything you post, share, like, comment on or message would be public data, available to anyone. It would make Facebook's job so much easier not having to worry about pesky issues such as privacy. And it's what Mark Zuckerberg really wants to create a more transparent, open world.
If Facebook went completely public, life would be easier for everyone. First, we'd all know the rules. There would be no ambiguities, no confusion, no surprises. Anything posted on Facebook would be public, making it even social because there's nothing like sharing everything with 500 million of your closest friends...or friends of friends.
For Facebook, privacy is a headache so let's turf it. Right now, Facebook wants to eat its cake and have it too when it comes to privacy. It wants to make a lot of data public to drive its business needs but, at the same time, it needs to meet the needs of consumers who want the ability to make some or most of their information private.
Perhaps the solution is a new service called Facebook Private. On FBP, everything is private other than what your friends can see. There's no worry about privacy settings because anyone you decide to let into your FBP network would have access, putting the onus the user to be selective about who let in to their inner circle.
With FBP launched, Facebook could then make the old Facebook completely public because users would have a clear about what service best fit their needs. At the end of the day, everyone would be much happier.
Does this make sense or what?