Bad news, Facebook: Only one in 10 people support your new Timeline feature, a survey by security firm Sophos reveals.
Timeline groups a user’s publicly viewable photos, comments and messages by date, creating a biography of sorts on a user’s profile page. A user’s Timeline goes all the way back to when they first joined Facebook.
Users can delete items in their Timelines – soppy messages posted to an ex’s Facebook Wall, for example – but it involves going through every single item in a Timeline.
What is irking many Facebook users is the fact Timeline will be compulsory – meaning users don’t have the option to choose to implement the feature on their profiles. Users are to be notified of the upcoming change, and the social network is giving them seven days to sort through their histories before their Timelines go live.
Critics have claimed Timeline is a violation of users’ privacy but Facebook says it is not making anything publicly available which isn’t already viewable, nor does it change a user’s privacy settings.
Users’ profiles will include an “activity log”, which will allow them to apply extra privacy settings to each post.
Sophos’ survey of 4,000 Facebook users revealed that only 8pc of respondents like Timeline, 51pc said they were “worried” by the new feature and another 8pc said they would “get used to it”, The Telegraph reported.
