Introduction

Online privacy had been one of the most discussed topics since the introduction of online blogs and social networks. With most of the attention place on Facebook before earlier this year, the topic remains ‘underground’ and only known for those who really want some cyberspace privacy, developers and business organisation or institutions. Any of us who familiar with Facebook can see that it require us to provide personal information and permission to post on our wall regardless whatever the application it might be.

A risk giving your identity to Facebook

Using those applications can provide our personal details to the developers, hence, expose our privacy. It is acceptable with games and business institution as they have to oblige to Facebook’s rules but many quizzes application are made from individual developers. This mean by using the program we ‘deliberately’ give them our emails and other info like name, place and such.

The emerging Google Plus and threating Facebook's throne

The situation so far have not occur any disasters so privacy still stay low as Facebook try to improve its system over time. However, from the day Google announced its newly born child Google+ and invade in to the social networks market. It created chaos everywhere. Used to fail on its attempt on Buzz (it looks like another email inbox personally), Google learnt from its experience and this time it really created a phenomenon. Although the network is in beta period, Google+ had reached 10 million users in only two weeks. This popularity is not only because Google is a famous company specialise in binary search engine but also because it provide a better way to organise friends (thus, better privacy) along with other characteristic of Facebook and other social network. Google+ also known for making networking evolution as it allow users to use online video chat in Hangout which have never been approached by any others. Moreover, using its search engine as a base, its +1 buttons scatter everywhere, allow Google users to add ‘points’ to that site popularity, therefore enhance its searching ability and vice versa.

Apparently, both Facebook and Google+ are competing with each other to gain as much users as possible. At this point, privacy became a vital aspect as nobody want scams on their pages and prevent people from using fake identities to wander around on the net. Take a look at Facebook, through the years: it had been updating its privacy statement. From mid-2010 it had started to apply changes to the page, allowing people to control on what they are sharing even after they tweak their privacy options. This means even you are a friend who is on settings which allow you to read all post, there still be some that hidden from the eye of you by manually set by the button on each post (sadly there no settings for others at this point). A post from CNNTech by Cashmore which listed 10 things that Google does better than Facebook, comparing these two, Google does pretty much the same thing. Circles (Google) are the same to friend groups (Facebook) which if you divide people up into group you can see where did they came from just like Circles’ feature. No offend but those claiming Facebook does not have that feature most likely is because they are too lazy to re-organise their friend list. Things that Google achieved superior to Facebook are group video chat, ad-free and integrated with Google products (such as the search engine). All others are true at the time but Facebook had catch up recently. Ad-free is impossible in Facebook, by all means, it is the main income apart from apps from other business which I suspect Google can keep it totally ad-free or at least the ability to turn them off.

Facebook changes in respond to Google Plus and it's "disadvantages"

Facebook is now give its users the ‘power’ to control what to see from EACH person with the downside is it would be a hassle to return to edit them all whereas Google can separate posts from games and updates apart.

At this point, we can tell that Google privacy settings are more global. Facebook, on the other hands, scatters the settings in order to keep up with Google which going to be difficult to organise. The reason for this frustrated action can be explained knowing many people out there are unaware of the situation but when something happen they push the fault over to the service providers or the system itself, no exeption in this case. The funny things found while researching for this article is some people are well unaware of these changed like Rowinski in his article on sharing changes on Facebook. Singel on his post was trying to say that Google is actually Facebook+. Seriously!? The content he wrote about is out of dated a year later compared to posts from the Business Insider and BBC which provide more recent updates from the network.

Conclusion

Until today, Facebook had done quite a jump in privacy settings in order to compete with Google+. The fact that Facebook is a solely a social network and become successful with more than 500 millions of users up till now had some what effect on Google popularity. Furthermore, some people also believe that search engines such as Google search are drifting to the land of uncertainty. They believe people are turning to social network to find the answers for their problems. Personally, this is so wrong. Search engines do their works to find as much as possible things that most relevant to the questions or queries while social network do … what was that again? The answer is nothing. Indeed you can rely on the network if you do have some geeks or nerds friends. However, the answers are definite and not that they know everything. Not to mention we have to wait until they reply. Just imagine Google was to be born before Facebook, even without group video chat feature, Facebook cannot possibly hope to stand a chance against Google with social network functions along with a huge integration with Google maps, Youtube and Google search. However, the reality is Facebook already in fast growing rate even at the time Google was introduced. Its long time establishment help it to stand against Google without further effort other than the ever-ending privacy issue. To justify this objectively and correctly, let’s look at the talk with Danah Boyd on “Making sense of privacy and publicity”. She address that the expose of privacy is inevitably how much you are trying do to keep it low and that we never know if people who were told will not spill the bean. She also said the problem is depending on us of how we depict “privacy and publicity”. Unfortunately, according to her, when she asks people of privacy setting she did not aware whether the person who was asked is aware of the matter or not. As a matter of fact, every Facebook account is originally public. The users will have to change their own privacy setting. It is not Facebook fault that people believe their content is ‘private’ all the time. Apart from this, her thoughts are much appreciated.

Facebook and Google (as I know) were once on the progress of trying to co-operate. Well, at least Google was thinking about that and it is a fact that Facebook is not going to be acquired by Google. However, Facebook refer Microsoft investment of 1.6% stake over Google offer. Still, it is not because of the deal that they are rivals at the moment. Vogelstein explains that the different is the system. Facebook is more of a humane nature whereas Google is on the algorithm side. Beside, personal privacy is going to be a difficult problem for developer as people (most of them) expects them to cope with their demand. It going to be a holy war I promise. Not between Google and Facebook but users and developers.

Reference list

Derene, G. (2008, April 16). How Social Networking Could Kill Web Search as We Know It. Retrieved from http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/gadgets/news/4259135

Cashmore, P. (2011, August 23). Google+: 10 things it does better. Retrieved from http://www.cnn.com/2011/TECH/social.media/08/23/google.plus.better.cashmore/

Boyd, D. (2010). Making Sense of Privacy and Publicity. Retrieved on August 23, 2011, from http://www.danah.org/papers/talks/2010/SXSW2010.html

Facebook reveals 'simplified' privacy changes. (2010, May 26). BBC News Technology. Retrieved from http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/10167143

Facebook changes privacy options. (2011, August 23).BBC News Technology. Retrieved from http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-14633427

O'Neill, N. (2009). 10 Privacy Settings Every Facebook User Should Know. Retrieved on August 27, 2011, from http://www.allfacebook.com/facebook-privacy-2009-02

Rowinski, D. (2011). Facebook Responds: Changes Privacy Settings and Sharing Options. Retrieved on August 27, 2011, from http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/facebook_responds_changes_privacy_settings_and_sha.php?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+readwriteweb+%28ReadWriteWeb%29

Scoble, R., Scobleizer (2011, August 24). Facebook’s New Privacy And Sharing Defenses Are Quite Nice. Retrieved from http://www.businessinsider.com/facebooks-new-privacy-and-sharing-defenses-they-are-quite-nice-2011-8

Singel, R. (2011, August 23). It’s Facebook+ as Social Giant Adds Google+ Features. Retrieved from http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2011/08/facegoogle/

Vogelstein, F. (2009, June 22). Great Wall of Facebook: The Social Network's Plan to Dominate the Internet — and Keep Google Out. Retrieved from http://www.wired.com/techbiz/it/magazine/17-07/ff_facebookwall