Privacy on Facebook
- Monday, May 17, 2010
You're going to think it's pretty funny that, as the owner of a marketing and advertising company, I'm going to caution you about the kind of information you might be giving out about yourself over the internet. Advertisers are always looking for potential markets. Recently, writers for the New York Times, PC World, and other savvy publications are sounding a warning about Facebook's privacy policy. It seems that Facebook reset a lot of your account information to be accessible to all registered users, even if you had set up your Account Settings differently. For example, under the Account Settings option, in the Facebook Ad tabs, two options are automatically turned on to share some information with advertising networks and friends. Anyone who wants to keep this information private must uncheck the boxes in that tab.
Unless you were paying attention to this change, your profile, photos, wall posts, etc. suddenly became available to friends of friends. That status post about your vacation plans (your home will be unattended, right?) and complaints about your boss can now be seen by perfect strangers. Could be one of them is a friend of your boss's friend who just couldn't wait to share the juicy gossip. In FB slang, it's called "creeping"; in the real world it's called an invasion of privacy. An invasion that you are allowing.
Facebook has over 400 million registered users worldwide, which means it is the Mother Lode of Databases. It was originally meant to be a social networking site, just a friendly sort of place you could drop in and keep in touch with people easily. But 400 million potential targets for non-friendly uses are just too tempting for some folks. Identity thieves can easily glean some necessary information about you from your Facebook site, such as birthdate, city, address, e-mail address, and workplace. Keep Facebook friendly and protect yourself by visiting all your Account Settings and setting them to "Just Friends."Labels: Facebook, Privacy on the internet
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