LotW for May 3 2010 – The FaceBook Edition

The FaceBook Edition

Full Disclosure – I do not use Facebook. I did set up an account once and all of the people I no longer wanted to be friends with were back. Call me antisocial but hey, there is a reason I do not want you to auto connect to me simply because I added a profile of where I went to Elementary School. I am not concerned that there is no longer much privacy as much as I am concerned about who controls my privacy. I teach and live in public ways that I choose and not a vendor. Therefore, I set my privacy controls depending on who I want to see my “stuff”. I prefer and Opt in versus Opt out policy.

This leads me to the Facebook edition where I am putting together a few links that address some rather important issues for those of you with Facebook accounts. This is not a judgement on whether you should or should not share your life on Facebook. Obviously, I choose to not share my life. I still have an analog life and a digital life.

What drove me to this post was listening to some very, very, very, smart people who write programs, run Internet companies describe how hard it is for them to manage their privacy settings in Facebook. It made me realize that some of you who use Facebook, but perhaps do not realize the depth of information you are revealing. In fact, two of them were deactivating their Facebook account until they could figure out how to manage the privacy.

The issue has not to do so much with what your Facebook Friends and you do, but what happens when a FoF interacts with your Friend. It seems as if the privacy setting you set for your Friends does not stop your Friend from passing on your information to one of their Friends who you are not a Friend of.

Again, I do not have first hand experience as I deleted my Facebook account shortly after opening one to communicate with a friend in Uganda.

Facebook Eroding Privacy Policy Timeline from Electronic Frontier Foundation
http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2010/04/facebook-timeline/

See What Facebook Publicly Publishes About You – Lifehacker
http://lifehacker.com/5526429/see-what-facebook-publicly-publishes-about-you

Use this link to enter in your Facebook ID or alias
http://zesty.ca/facebook/

Time to Audit Your Facebook Privacy Settings – Here is How by Gina Tripani
http://www.fastcompany.com/1624745/time-to-audit-your-facebook-privacy-settings

Facebook’s New Social Plugins – Now 50,000 plus in one week – an article from Mashable
http://mashable.com/2010/04/28/facebook-social-plugins/
Facebook for Parents from CommonSenseMedia
http://www.commonsensemedia.org/facebook-parents

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