It will soon be 19 years since the launch of Facebook. Almost two decades in which social networks have gone from being something minority and still incipient, to becoming one of the main means of communication and information for millions and millions of people throughout the world. Some years in which we have seen how the perception of them changed, the success of many, the collapse of even more and the erratic present of those that, at the time, seemed to be the most important in the world.
Mainly I speak, of course, about Facebook and Twitter. Regarding the second, in recent weeks we are witnessing a truly bizarre and grotesque process, worthy of the best of the fascinating inventiveness of Don Ramón María del Valle-Inclán. Now, that since the arrival of Elon Musk that network has become a permanent fire, it does not mean that before that it was a happy arcadia. Quite the contrary, the service already suffered from not a few problems such as hate and misleading information that, yes, at least those responsible were trying to solve it.
Facebook, for its part, lived through a golden age, a time when its numbers didn’t grow, it’s that they looked like a spaceship taking flight. Those were naive times, in which many of the users of the social network did not hesitate to publish some quite private aspects on it. Sexuality, political ideology, religious beliefs… information, all of them, that today enjoy an enormous level of protection by regulations such as the GDPR but that, in those days, were publicly revealed in user profiles or, at least , were uploaded to the platform.
The Facebook reputation crisis sparked by the Cambridge Analytica scandal changed everything. Suddenly many people began to wonder if it made sense to have uploaded such information to Facebook, either to make it public or to keep it private. Suddenly, as if impelled by the coup, millions of users began to delete said information from their profiles and, at the same time, the use of the social network’s services decreased little by little, but steadily.
Facebook is removing religious views and ‘interested in’ info from profiles from 1 December 2022 pic.twitter.com/SKjSrtwUwm
—Matt Navarra (@MattNavarra) November 16, 2022
Now, a little late (but hey, better late than never) Facebook has decided to remove certain information from its users’ profilesjust like He has detected social media consultant Matt Navarra. Specifically, Navarra cites religion and sexuality (heterosexual, homosexual, bisexual, etc.), but a later statement by Facebbok also adds political ideology and the address of the user to the list.
It is well known that, for years, Facebook has used this data to offer a formidable level of segmentation, used by advertisers to fine-tune their campaigns, something that has given rise to more than one controversy due to the tortious use of the same. Now, with this movement, Facebook, as part of its plans to “return to cool”, intends to clean up its image a bit and see if, in this way, it can recover, even partially, the more than battered trust of its users.
“As part of our efforts to make Facebook easier to navigate and use, we’re removing some profile fields: Interested In, Religious Views, Political Views, and Address”, said Emil Vázquez, spokesperson for Meta. “We are sending notifications to people who filled out these fields, informing them that these fields will be removed. This change does not affect anyone’s ability to share this information about themselves elsewhere on Facebook.”.
Seen from today’s perspective, the level of innocence (not to say naivety) with which many users acted on social networks like Facebook during its early years is surprising. However, it must be borne in mind that they were very different times (I repeat, almost 20 years have passed), and that the perception of security and privacy has evolved a lot, and very well, in this period. Thus, what is important is not so much what we did in the past, but rather that currently no one (or practically no one, as there are always exceptions) would think of acting that way again.
