On Facebook, the Semantics of Visibility vs. Privacy

When I called Facebook to ask why the company had changed the settings for the display of people’s e-mail addresses without their permission, potentially violating users’ privacy, I was told that the swap was not a “privacy” change, but rather a “visibility setting” change. I offered a genuinely confused response to Jaime Schopflin, a Facebook spokeswoman I spoke with. “Um, isn’t changing the visibility of something actually changing the privacy setting?” I asked. “No,” Ms. Schopflin said, explaining that they are two different things. To Facebook, the words privacy and visibility may be as different as peas and carrots. But Facebook users and one linguistic expert I talked to seem to disagree. Jesse Sheidlower, the editor at large of the Oxford English Dictionary, said Facebook’s effort to draw such a distinction was “worse than playing semantics.”