Facebook’s new application ‘The Timeline’: Will it be a privacy disaster?

Facebook.com has launched a new application on the social networking website called the ‘Timeline’. At the moment, it is in a testing phase and only a select-few have benefited from it but the company plans on launching it in the first quarter of 2012.

The app will join together a user’s previously uploaded pictures in a timeline, according to time and date of their upload.

Where the new application comes with some positives, it also has some negative aspects too. First the pros of the new app are as follow:

The Timeline will provide the single platform to relive the history. It will also options to curate the pile of snapshots the user has uploaded on the website.

The new app will let friends and family go through good times one has lived through and will create a memorabilia of how he lived his life for example, from his academic period through professional life. In addition, it also has a ’Birth’ option that will
allow the user to add his childhood pictures.

It also incorporates daily activities to the timeline. However, the application deliberately ignores people a user has ‘friended’ or ‘defriended’ in the past.

However, the major concern is tattering of privacy from certain angles.

When spoken to a Facebook official, she said that Timeline will be an invitation-based application in the start but with time it will become a mandatory app that will automatically sort the pictures according to time and date they were added.

Another big concern is the curation itself. Sorting through a host of such files, the user might miss some pictures he/she uploaded at some point in time. The only option to sort with is date. However, so many dates might become a tough task for a user who
has numerous activities and pictures uploaded every day.

The friends’ group is an ever progressing pool at Facebook. This might become a problem in the future when a boss, now your friend on Facebook, finds out some ‘absurd’ pictures in the timeline that the user uploaded in the college life.

Moreover, there is a world map in the app that will show the places that the user has visited in the past, sorted on the statuses uploaded from those locations. This looks a very flamboyant feature at first sight but it might have some serious repercussion
in the future. With the help of this application, everyone will be able to know where the user has visited most and where can he be found at ‘odd times’.

The bottom line of this comparison is very simple: “Good Luck in using Facebook in 2012.”

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Posted by Usman Khalid on Nov 16 2011. Filed under Sci-Tech. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry