Facebook and Google users: Your social media and online life is about to change, and there's almost nothing you can do about it.
Facebook is rolling out Timeline, a scrapbooklike profile page that gathers every post a user has made and arranges them by year, while Google is making changes to its privacy policies that some see as the latest attack against Internet users.
Google announced it is merging the privacy policies covering more than 60 services — including search, Gmail, YouTube and calendar — into one unified document effective March 1. The new document gives Google the power to take user information from all its services and use that data to learn about a user. The only way users can opt out of the policy is to close their Google accounts.
Google's decision has prompted concern among privacy advocates including U.S. Rep. Edward J. Markey, a Democrat from Massachusetts and former chairman of the Subcommittee on Telecommunications and the Internet, who said in a statement that the move raises "important questions about how much control Google users will have over their personal information."
Christopher Gatewood, a media and intellectual property attorney with Threshold Counsel based in Richmond, Va., says the change is the price users pay for using Google.
"For Google, it's a matter of serving up better data for each user, across services," he said. "That gives some people the creeps, so they will want to decide how much personal data to run through any Google service.
"It's a new cost of using Google's services, which are free or very cheap," he said. "Nobody likes new costs, monetary or otherwise, but it's not like they are going to start publishing all Gmail emails."
Gatewood warns that everyone should be aware of how their information is used online.
"You should assume that your online movements and anything you type into any online service will be data-mined and stored somewhere," he said. "And that's nothing new. It's where it's tied to your identity and a lot of other personal information that the big privacy concerns arise. It is more important than ever to be an informed online consumer."
As with Google, Facebook's radical redesign of user profiles via Timeline has raised new issues about users' activities.
While Timeline has been available to certain users since late last year, it soon will become mandatory for everyone, according to Facebook's corporate blog. Users will get a week to preview the changes and adjust the privacy setting of any posts they don't want others — such as relatives and employers — to see.
Marcus Messner, a professor at Virginia Commonwealth University who specializes in social media, says users should use their preview time to review their posts.
"While Timeline does not change a Facebook user's privacy settings, it makes previously hidden content newly available," he said. "Let's say you made an outrageous comment during the 2008 presidential election that was long forgotten because visitors to the profile would have to dig through page after page to get to it. Through the features of Timeline, this comment now becomes accessible again."
Facebook users should always be cognizant of their privacy settings, Messner says.
Reaction to Timeline is split. Many users are more concerned with the new design rather than privacy.
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