Editorial

This Sunday I was visiting a church where the pastor was doing a series of sermons on women in the Bible. He mentioned that he put a question on his Facebook account asking women of his church to comment on how others within the church had impacted their lives. In the past, I would have immediately been delighted to see a pastor using Facebook in such an innovative way. But lately, I am leaning toward those that are hesitant to use Facebook due to their privacy issues!

It seems that Facebook is under attack from every side. Some Senators such as Charles Schumer of NY, Michael Bennet of CO, Mark Begich of Alaska and others have joined forces in asking the FTC to get involved in regulating Facebook concerning privacy matters. It seems, in an attempt to make Facebook better the Facebook providers add new services and change the way their site works. However, when they have done this, they have reset everyone's account and left it to Facebook users to opt in to privacy and security features. They could have just as easily introduced new features and given their users the option to opt in, but instead they opened up the Facebook user's site, leaving up to us to quickly log in and turn off our profiles.

Some might wish to give Facebook the benefit of the doubt, but it is common knowledge that Facebook sells marketing to many companies wishing to target their marketing dollars. By opening up everyone's account, they made it possible for these companies to use software to quickly grab information from millions of accounts. Information that before Facebook opened the door would have been restricted as a result of the privacy settings of their users.

A new survey by Sophos, a computer security organization, reveals that as high as 60% of those claiming to be Facebook users are leaving Facebook, or plan to leave in the near future. My wife has enjoyed using Facebook in the past, but she was a bit upset when she logged in to discover that Facebook had reset her privacy settings three days earlier.

For many, Facebook had become the new email. However, along with the increased use by our society, the security risks have increased as well. And, with Facebook's recent decision to disrespect their users' privacy, it might have a major impact in social networking overall.

Does your church have a Facebook site? Do you? How will the recent behavior of Facebook affect your future use? I would love to hear from you on this subject!

Together We Serve Him,

Steve Hewitt (steve@ccmag.com)
Editor-in-Chief
Christian Computing