Facebook Schedules Privacy Summit: Is Reform on the Way?

Bloggers look for reconciliation

Prompted by a rising tide of angry users, Facebook is calling a company-wide meeting to address privacy issues. In the past few months, the company has been hounded by senators and challenged by competitors offering platforms with greater privacy. On Tuesday, Facebook's VP for public policy held a Q&A with the New York Times that, in some ways, did more damage than good. What can we expect from the company's 4:00 p.m. meeting?

• Good May Come of This, writes Ian Paul at PC World: "Perhaps Thursday's all hands meeting is the beginning of Facebook's effort to improve user guidance on issues of sharing and privacy as Schrage mentioned, or maybe the company is considering a roll back of new features as All Facebook suggests. Regardless, it will be interesting to see if Facebook announces any changes to its new features in the coming days, as the network attempts to deal with recent criticisms over its new features and data sharing policies."

• I'm Skeptical, writes Rahsheen Porter at Black Web: "It’s debatable whether Facebook will be able to turn this thing around or even if they are looking to do so. While they have lost a few users, they are still #1 and this may just be a play to simply cool things down a bit."

• Look for Talk of 'Instant Personalization,' writes Shane McGlaun at Daily Tech: "There are no official details about topics at the meeting, but the much-debated 'Instant Personalization' feature is sure to be on the schedule at the meeting. This feature drew the ire of Schumer for sharing information with third parties without getting the express permission of the user."

• Advice for the Company  SEO and Tech Daily writes: "Facebook needs to slow down and/or provide very visible notification (and simple instructions) to users on how to share ... and more importantly ... not to share .... depending on one's situation. If you were using Friendfeed, you knew your stuff was public (or you had very simple controls to block it)."