About Facebook privacy
I don’t use Facebook, but friends and members of my family do. As a result, I am concerned about the privacy issues regarding the posting of personal information on this social network. Facebook has recently published some practices governing the management of privacy settings. I have already made one post on how the settings might mislead someone into making information public that was intended to be private.
Search expert Danny Sullivan has written about the Facebook settings on his personal blog and what he says should concern all Facebook users. Sullivan finds the privacy settings to be so complex that even an Internet expert has trouble:
I don’t have time for this. I don’t have time to try and figure out the myriad of ways that Facebook may or may not want to use my information. That’s why I almost shut down my entire account this week. It would be a hell of a lot easier than this mess.
At Electronic Frontier, Kevin Bankston writes:
In conclusion, we at EFF are worried that today’s changes will lead to Facebook users publishing to the world much more information about themselves than they ever intended. Back in 2008, Facebook told Canada’s Privacy Commissioner that “users are given extensive and precise controls that allow them to choose who sees what among their networks and friends, as well as tools that give them the choice to make a limited set of information available to search engines and other outside entities.” In its report from July, The Privacy Commissioner relied on such statements to conclude that Facebook’s default settings fell within “reasonable expectations,” specifically noting that the “privacy settings — and notably all those relating to profile fields — indicate information sharing with ‘My Networks and Friends.’”
No longer. Major privacy settings are now set to share with everyone by default, in some cases without any user choice, and we at EFF do not think that those new defaults fall within the average Facebook user’s “reasonable expectations”. If you’re a Facebook user and you agree, we urge you to visit the Facebook Site Governance page and leave a comment telling Facebook that you want real control over all of your data. In the meantime, those users who care about control over their privacy will have to decide for themselves whether participation in the new Facebook is worth such an extreme privacy trade-off.
Basically, it looks to me like the safest assumption is that anything placed on Facebook is accessible by anyone.
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