Protect Yourself, Facebook Style
If you're like me, you have a love/hate relationship with Facebook. I love that I'm connected to people from a variety of different areas of my life. I don't have to worry about catching up at high school reunions because Facebook has done most of the work for me. With the touch of a button, I can invite hundreds of people over for an 80's party and then post the pictures after.
This, however, is where I start to hate Facebook. It's gotten too public. WAY too public - I'm friends with my parents, my godfather, friends of my parents, professors. I'm even friends with the dean of my graduate school on Facebook; his recent trip to China seemed to go quite well, by the way.
There is public information about me on Facebook that I'm not comfortable with displaying. However, the alteration of recent privacy settings means that I'm not able to make that information private. Some people have suggested that if we're not comfortable having certain information available to the wider public online, then maybe we shouldn't be engaged with that information or have those friends.
To this idea and people who espouse this view, I'm baffled. Have they always shared every bit of information about themselves to every person they meet? I'd rather not let my grandmother know about certain bits of my life, just like I'd rather not let my friends know everything I'm interested in. What I tell my brother may be drastically different from what I tell the kid that sat next to me in 10th grade math class. And you know what? That's perfectly fine.
The point is that it's for us to decide what information is made public about ourselves. It's not Facebook's job to make pictures of me open for public viewing. It may be more lucrative for Facebook to sell my public information to marketers, but individual privacy shouldn't be determined by profits. We shouldn't be tricked into making that information public, also.
Navigating Facebook privacy settings is confusing and takes a long time. However, here are some articles that will help you protect your information and allow you to choose what you show the world and your various social circles.
How to Protect Your Privacy with Facebook's New Privacy Settings in 17 Easy Steps
8 Steps to Regain Control of Your Facebook Privacy
A Facebook Proposal: Let's Make Gmail Contacts and Google Reader Subscriptions Public
Demand Your dotRights: Facebook Petition - a petition by the ACLU about putting comprehensive privacy controls into the hands of users.
Lindsay Bacher
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Reader Comments (4)
Great post Lindsay! Sometimes people share way too much. When FB made those privacy changes a while back, I took the time to go through and made everything as private as I could. I understand that as a company the more public the info the better it is for them and I appreciate the fact that they offer a way to make things private. I think people forget that Facebook is a free service that has allowed people to make or reconnect with people all over the world & FB does need to make a profit somehow.
You are so right! I come up with a new status, and within minutes, my mother or my aunt or someone of their capacity comments. I understand why Facebook decided to make access to their site completely open, but it has certainly had a bittersweet impact on my life. Now every time I do anything on Facebook, even making comments on friends' walls, I have to wonder what all of the people outside of my peer group will think. It's exhausting.
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I have had big issues with this in the past, and not in the way you might think. In a retail environment, I would never cry in front of customers; in other arenas i'd never get emotional in front of clients. But in private meetings with mentors or superiors, I let emotions run free and cried when things got intense. I made the mistake of thinking that these meetings were a "safe" environment to "get real" in with trusted leaders; WRONG! I ended up leaving several higher-ups with an opinion of me as a basket case, especially those who assumed I was the same way outside of the (apparently not-so-) safe meeting space.