U.S. Senators Altering Facebook

The privacy issues Facebook arrises are not just spoken of by concerned parents, but now U.S. Senators are calling attention to them. Due to some of Facebook's latest updates, privacy precautions have been stressed less, resulting in users having "less control over private information, and it was done without the users' permission," Sen. Charles Schumer, D-New York, said on Capitol Hill stated. Due to the fact that Facebook's population has been consistently increasing, providing sufficient privacy settings for all 400 million users has been a struggle. Yet Facebook is making steady progress in ensuring all users that their information will be private. They are in the midst of converting the regular settings, where information is automatically shared with the public, to the "opt-in" setting, where no information is shown automatically, and instead one must choose what he/she wants to display to the public. "The way to go is opt-in," Schumer said. "The default position should be that the information is not shared, not that the information is shared. Amplifying his colleagues' concerns, Schumer called on Facebook to "reverse its policy so that users have to opt in to shared data, rather than opt out." With both parents, administrative figures, and now political figures on Facebook's case, they will surely clean up their act in terms of providing their users with more trustworthy privacy.

In terms of how this article correlates to an historical event, I feel as though this relates to when communication devices were first invented. Take the telegraph, for example. During the Industrial Revolution, inventors discovered a way to communicate via telegraph, sending messages from one location to another through a transporter and receiver. One of the biggest issues they faced with the telegraph was ensuring privacy amongst the messages being sent. In order for any messages to be received, they had to be decoded first, which was done most likely by someone who worked for the receiver of the message. This means that whatever information was being sent was not always kept private. Technical similarities between Facebook and the telegraph are scarce, yet the purpose they both hold is to make communicating and social networking possible. Also, they both have carried the same issue- ensuring privacy. Although it was difficult to provide much privacy for telegraph users, Facebook has and continues to search for new ways in order to ensure privacy to its users.