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Privacy, a continual vigil

Just read an interesting post on ZDNet entitled "Facebook's privacy changes: When will it go too far (and will you even notice)?". Now I had kind of been aware that Facebook has been tinkering with privacy settings and knew that I should check mine out to see that everything was in order. One of the reasons I use Facebook is to share photos with my family of my family and I want to protect their privacy (maybe I am kind of foolish to use Facebook to do this). I thought I had locked down my Facebook account enough to be able to participate in networking with friends, colleagues and family at the levels that I wanted. However, the continual changing by Facebook seems to have eroded that completely. For example, while I thought I had protected my family with the initial basic settings that Facebook used to have, there is now a myriad of privacy settings and the default options for them are anything but private and bear no resemblance to the settings I thought I had in place. Today I found out that friends can share the following about me through other applications and websites:* Personal info (activities, interests, etc.)

* Status updates

* Online presence

* Website

* Family and relationship status

* Relationship details (significant other, looking for, etc.)

* Education and work

* My videos

* My links

* My notes

* My photos

* Photos and videos of me

* About me

* My birthday

* My hometown

* My religious and political views

The only option that was turned off was my photos however inspecting settings for them I was surprised at the number of levels I had to lock down to really keep them private too. The last thing I want is for Facebook to allow anyone or any application to share my birthday as that is a major identity risk but there it is. Other personal identifying information that Facebook has should be fully and very clearly under my control. Location information too is something that I want full control of over when and how I share it however any number of other services seem to have this information available to them without my knowledge or approval. There is an option to edit blocked applications but I can only see what applications I have blocked, not what others are accessing my information that I don't know about, have forgotten or otherwise. I urge all Facebook account users to check their privacy settings out just to ensure you understand what information you are giving away and try to think about the implications of that. The same applies for other social networks that you are using but Facebook does know a lot about us. There are some that would say we lost our privacy sometime ago and just need to accept it. However, our society is far from perfect and there is a need for us to be aware of the implications of how information about us can be used in ways that enhance our lives or to harm us. We need to manage that information to the best of our abilities and ensure that those who are custodians of information about us, protect that information and only use it in ways that we understand and approve.