Facebook: What privacy?

DO you have a Facebook account?

It seems like every dog and his brother is on the world’s biggest social networking site these days. Facebook happily reports that it has more than 350 million active users. Of these, about 8.4 million are from the Philippines, which makes it the ninth biggest country in terms of Facebook users, says Nick Burcher, who has tracked usage statistics since 2008. In Asia, only Indonesia, with 14.7 million users, is bigger than we are, according to the December 2009 figures. The biggest country, by far, is the United States, of course, with 101.3 million users.

Surrounded by so many millions of Facebook users, I sometimes feel a bit of a Luddite for steadfastly refusing to hop on the bandwagon.

I refuse on the grounds that outside a small circle of family and friends, there are very few people with whom I want to share any kind of personal information: how old I am, what school I attended, or who my other friends are. Nor do I want the world to see some unflattering photo that someone took at the company Christmas party.
The dangers of exposing personal information to complete strangers seems self-evident, yet I am constantly surprised at how people don’t give this much thought when they start posting family photos on Facebook.

Risk No. 1: There are unsavory characters online – identity thieves, sexual predators, and marketing types come to mind – who prowl Facebook and other social networking sites. They don’t want to be your friends; they want to use and abuse you. Why make it easy for them?

Risk No. 2:  If you’re not careful, you risk exposing some indiscretion or some embarrassing opinion or detail about yourself that you will regret later. It might have seemed hilarious at the time to post that photo of you in drag on Facebook, but your prospective school or employer who surfs social networking sites to screen applicants might not be overly impressed. And even if you sober up and remove the photo later, chances are someone has already picked it up and posted it elsewhere. In fact, it might pop up the next time you Google your name.

But hang on. Don’t you control what others can see on Facebook?

Well, yes.... and no.

Facebook announced a new privacy policy last Dec. 9 that is clearly intended to push people toward sharing even more of their data with the public. For example, its new “recommended” settings share the content they post to Facebook, such as status messages and wall posts, with everyone on the Internet.
Under the new policy, Facebook also treats your personal information – your name, profile picture, current city, gender, networks, and the pages that you are a “fan” of ― as publicly available information.

“Before, users were allowed to restrict access to much of that information,” says the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), an Internet watchdog group. “Now, however, those privacy options have been eliminated. For example, although you used to have the ability to prevent everyone but your friends from seeing your friends list, that old privacy setting ― shown below ― has now been removed completely from the privacy settings page.”

By now, the new rules are starting to look like an anti-privacy policy. But there’s more.

Facebook previously allowed users who didn’t want their information shared with application developers over the Facebook Platform (including the makers of that insipid, time-wasting farm game) the option of telling Facebook to “not share any information about me through the Facebook API [application programming interface.”
That option has disappeared, the EFF says, and now faceless developers and entrepreneurs, about 1 million of them, can suck up all of your “publicly available information” whenever a friend of yours adds an application.

Under fire for the anti-privacy settings, here’s what Mark Zuckerberg, the 25-year-old founder and chief executive of Facebook had to say.
“In the last five or six years, blogging has taken off in a huge way and all these different services that have people sharing all this information,” Zuckerberg told TechCrunch.

“People have really gotten comfortable not only sharing more information and different kinds, but more openly and with more people. That social norm is just something that has evolved over time.

“We view it as our role in the system to constantly be innovating and be updating what our system is to reflect what the current social norms are.
“A lot of companies would be trapped by the conventions and their legacies of what they’ve built, doing a privacy change - doing a privacy change for 350 million users is not the kind of thing that a lot of companies would do. But we viewed that as a really important thing, to always keep a beginner’s mind and what would we do if we were starting the company now and we decided that these would be the social norms now and we just went for it.”

Translation: We at Facebook know you no longer value your privacy, so stop whining and start sharing so we can start making some money.

My status message to Facebook: Thanks, but no thanks.