Facebook Wants You To Share Even More Information About Yourself

Facebook introduced yet another tool this week designed to encourage you to share more personal information. The move comes in the midst of the company’s overhaul of the News Feed function. The site wants to take the feature back to its origins, emphasizing personal content from your friends and family over viral articles and shared videos.

The status update box at the top of your feed will soon get a new feature called Lists. This is the first update to its status function since the site introduced colored backgrounds a year ago, and it will allow users to make and share lists of anything they choose. The idea is your friends could copy your list, comment on it, offer advice and more. But, of course, this tool is also a sneaky way for Facebook to learn even more about you.

While it’s good that Facebook is cutting down on spammy content in your feed, it shouldn’t necessarily come at the expense of your personal information. After all, if you created and shared a list about the errands you needed to get done this weekend, what would stop Facebook from providing that info to advertisers? This tool is a potential gold mine for them — but it’s just another way to lose private info for us.