Facebook, Privacy, and Your Church Facebook Page
Since about December of last year Facebook has been aggressively adding new features. Nothing unusual, right? Except for one thing; by default they started making data that you had previously considered private, public and able to be indexed by Google, Bing and Yahoo!.
Last month at a major conference for facebook they added additional features that expose even more user data by default. One of the major changes that happened over the past few months is that photo galleries were made public. So now, it’s a lot easier to facebook stalk someone. You can see their photos, read their status updates, and even see the pages they are fans of.
That’s a problem, especially for churches who desire to use facebook as a way to reach out to the unchurched or anyone looking for a new church. For instance, let’s say you are looking for a new church and you happen upon the website of First Church of Jesus Christ Holiness Charismatic Fellowship of the North and see that they have a facebook page. You start checking out its fans and you notice several have their photo albums public. If you noticed a few pictures that are a little on the sexually racy side, what kind of conclusions/assumptions are you going to make about that church and it’s members? Probably not a good one. And therein lies the problem.
The privacy issue simultaneously creates the conditions for a PR issue for churches. Some of you may be thinking that it makes no sense to judge a person without actually meeting them. However, this is what is typical in a society that is obsessed with facebook.
At any rate I think we need to do two things:
- Lock down your facebook profile to protect your private information.
- If you are in charge of the facebook page for your church, begin educating your members about removing their photos from public view. This will help keep some of the questionable images from becoming a problem.
I personally find it a little shocking how cavalier a company as large as facebook has been with handling user data. Now it all makes sense after reading this IM conversation between 19yr old Mark Zuckberg and a college friend:
Zuck: Yeah so if you ever need info about anyone at Harvard
Zuck: Just ask.
Zuck: I have over 4,000 emails, pictures, addresses, SNS
[Redacted Friend's Name]: What? How’d you manage that one?
Zuck: People just submitted it.
Zuck: I don’t know why.
Zuck: They “trust me”
Zuck: Dumb fucks.
Robert
I love theology and the challenge of making deep teachings non-boring. Let's face it, most of the time we hear theological teaching, it really is boring. Does it really have to be that way? Nope.
