When Facebook changes its privacy policy, users are notified with a small dialog box at the top of their “home” screen, which includes a link to further information on the modification. Do Facebook users take the time to follow this link and investigate what has changed? Many users believe that they take adequate precautionary measures by simply monitoring what friends they accept, as they assume those are the only users that can see the content they post. According to Grimmelmann (2010), “social networking sites activate the subconscious cues that make users think they are interacting within bounded, closed, private spaces” (p. 803). In December 2009, Facebook rolled out an entirely new privacy structure on the website, with “recommended” privacy settings selected as the default level of control for each user. These “recommended” settings allow statuses, photos, and wall posts created by the user to be viewed by “everyone” – the entire Facebook community. Suddenly, user-posted content was accessible by larger audiences than most people intended. According to the Electronic Frontier Foundation (2009), Facebook implemented these changes so that they “could have a better stream of content to go against Twitter in the real-time search race” (para. 10). The Electronic Frontier Foundation
(EFF) purported that the changes were for the good. EFF (2009) stated the site was “forcing all of its users to actually pay attention to the specifics of their privacy settings” (para. 7). Whether or not users actually did pay attention is a different story