Study Says Facebook Privacy Concerns Are on the Rise – Is It Accurate?

  Posted on May 4, 2012 by Mashable in Featured, Social Media

Consumer Report’s annual State of the Net study found that people are increasingly concerned with their privacy on Facebook. The report breaks down social privacy into a handful of categories: over-sharing by users, underuse of privacy controls, over-collection of data, over-sharing of data by apps and cyberbullying or harassment.

2,002 online households were surveyed, including 1,340 Facebook users. Based on those numbers, Consumer Reports extrapolated its results upon the rest of Facebook’s 188 million North American users.

The study raises alarms about Facebook’s privacy practices — but does the author do enough to back up his or her claims?

Over-Sharing

4.8 million Facebook users have posted their plans for the day on the site, according to the report’s extrapolation. Consumer Reports suggests that’s a potential tip-off for thieves who can use that information to plan a robbery.

The report was unclear about how many of those 4.8 million users set their location sharing to “friends only,” which would drastically reduce the threat of theft. Jeff Fox, technology editor at Consumer Reports, told Mashable that 10-15% of Facebook users set their sharing to “public,” rather than friends-only. That’s about 500,000 of those 4.8 million location-sharers.

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