Disclaimer: I am pro-sharing and find Facebook an amazing platform to share. Strongly recommend using reclaim to verify your Facebook privacy settings
Remember the good old days when mum told us not to talk or accept candy from strangers, it was advice enough to being with, as we grew, we learnt to trust, to share, and soon some of those strangers were our closest friends.
That is the key to sharing, deciding and choosing whom to trust/share and more importantly how much.
Internet has made sharing easy for us, from a public blog to a ‘off the record’ private chat all from the comfort of our couch. In exchange we open ourselves to profiling in the name of targeted marketing or advertisement usually without a second thought of the ramifications.
When we converse with a group of people, the chances of it being shared with others would be minimal and being exactly reproduced almost nil, but when shared on a social network it lives on to haunt forever, shared with the click of a button and all it takes is a ‘Copy and Paste’ to re-produce.
It’s not the social networks fault if we are over-sharing. They do provide all sorts of settings granted that they might be difficult to understand and use, can’t blame them after all they are in it for the money. Did we not already know that when we ‘choose’ to join the network?, of-course we knew (and if this were a movie we would hear our mothers warnings in the background) and yet we choose and then we are hooked, enslaved, quitting is no longer an option.
Lets take Facebook for example
What does Facebook know about us?
Everything we choose to share and what they can interpret from it (and they do a fine job).
The Mandatory Information
First and Last Name, date of birth (age), email, sex, our login history i.e. IP addresses translating into locations.
The Good-to-haves
Imported address book schools, and employers (almost mandatory, after all you are there to find/make friends)
current city, hometown, family, relationships, networks, activities, interests and places, last but not the least political and religious views.
Make no mistake this is the perfect tool to profile you. Every action is stored, every item you share(d), everything you like(d) or clamor(ed) for a dislike button for, everything you comment(ed) on, everything you ignore(d), all your edits (remove and share), all your ‘remove’ s ( btw which is not a real delete, just made unavailable to all), all the actions taken on services offered by applications built on the Facebook platform, all the advertizing (targeted/otherwise) related actions/information for 180 days, after which it will be ‘anonymized’ (their word not mine) and everything is neatly organized for easy access.
The parts that your friends can share, here I copy-paste to reproduce
“You (and those you make your information available to) may use tools like RSS feeds, mobile phone address book applications, or copy and paste functions, to capture, export (and in some cases, import) information from Facebook, including your information and information about you. For example, if you share your phone number with your friends, they may use third party applications to sync that information with the address book on their mobile phone.”
What should you know about Facebook?
Its their policies, technically we should have know these and an informed decision to join, you may read the details at http://www.Facebook.com/policy.php and http://www.Facebook.com/terms.php
What you should note?
If you make the time to read through you will notice that shockingly (well maybe not so shocking for all) there is no liability on Facebook, more shockingly there is no direct threat/fear of prosecution on the people who inherently have access to our information i.e. their employees/partners and the third party applications authorized by us and our friends.
Cant help but mention my love for google for nailing this http://www.google.com/privacypolicy.html (Sections: Information sharing and Information security).
While it’s not really important but you may also notice some of the links to the help page are broken and you may report them here !!
What should you do?
Damned if you share damned if you don’t.
Facebook takes our word for granted, when you ‘friend’ someone it treats them with the respect and showers them with the privileges that you should provide your friend and their friends.
Its upto us to be honest with it, our friend network should reflect our level of trust and easy of sharing with them, only the people who deserve the respect and privileges that will be inherently showered upon them.
Prune and organize our friends and more importantly insist/encourage our friends to do the same.
The commandments of pruning our friend network
a. Thou shall un-friend all the people we want to prune. Note: Facebook doesn’t notify them that they are ‘un-friend-ed’.
b. Thou shall not be embarrassed to ignore friend requests. Note: we should mark spammers as ‘people we don’t know’, will help fight spam.
c. Thou shall ponder and choose who to share what with. Note: customized sharing
d. Thou shall guiltlessly block people, who you never want to share anything with. This section is no longer for the exes or the weirdos who give us the ‘heebie jeebies’. This can majorly be used to control re-production, access to what your friends can share. Note: your content shared with ‘everybody’ is still visible/accessible out of Facebook and once out of Facebook it aint your sheriff.
For example if you have added your colleague but not the boss and you colleague has added the boss, your content could be reproduced, your colleague’s mentions/tagging of you is visible to the boss, Blocking the boss is the only one-step way to ensure that all of your updates remain hidden from the boss.
These may seem cold and unnecessary/over-reactions, I choose to plead with the classic, ‘Better safe than sorry’.
Organizing your network
Would it be easier if you could share your views on your cousin’s wedding with only relatives and not office buddies?
Wouldn’t it be easier if we could crack jokes on professors only with classmates?
Wouldn’t it be easier if you could crack your jokes on your boss with everyone other than him/her?
There is no direct setting to my knowledge (incase there is please leave a comment with the same) there is a little painful work around, customized sharing.
For every status update (content share), we can customize our sharing by choosing a share-list (friends or list of friends Facebook will be visible to) and a hide-list (friends or list of friends Facebook will make them invisible). Safe to note that overlapping contacts in the shared list against the hide-list, the hide-list overrules the share-list and the content is NOT made visible.
To ease customized sharing we need to organize our friend network into lists, as granular as possible.
PS: I strongly recommend using reclaim to verify your Facebook privacy settings before the new settings roll out and to always take a minute to ‘ponder’ before we share.
