Delete Billboard for the 2009 New York Street Advertising Takeover by Ji Lee, image via his website
I don't have a lot of illusions about privacy when using social media such as Flickr or Twitter, but there is a difference when a company like Facebook behaves in a really sleazy fashion.
I work on websites every day, including my own such as the art calendar ArtCat. I did not start out with one privacy policy for the calendar, and then gradually claim the right to use more and more information submitted to us. For example, I could offer a list of contemporary art galleries for sale to advertisers or artists looking for representation, but that would be wrong because it's not what the galleries expected when they gave information to us. However, given the changes in Facebook's privacy policy since 2005, they would consider this perfectly reasonable behavior.
In addition, with recent changes to their development platform, Facebook applications have more and more access to your private data, including applications you have not chosen to install, but your friends have. Want to share information only with friends? You're sharing it with applications that your friends use.
And how about those neat new sharing tools introduced by Facebook? Until they corrected a bug, visiting sites that are using Open Graph allowed them to install an application to your profile without asking you. Given their privacy track record, including the recent exposure of private chats, I wouldn't trust them to fix those holes quickly. "Instant personalization" indeed.
Related:
- The Rumpus: Conversations About the Internet #5: Anonymous Facebook Employee
- rocket.ly: Why You Should Still Quit Facebook
- ReadWriteWeb: How to Delete Facebook Applications
- Electronic Frontier Foundation: Six Things You Need to Know About Facebook Connections
- groovyPost: How to Permanently Delete your Facebook Account
I just had a conversation by email about this with someone this morning, and the only solutions I could come up with were 1) a completely private profile for friends that shares nothing, and one related to business that shared everything (on top of my Fan, I mean "Like" Pages), or 2) Cancel my account.
I haven't decided yet. But I do know that I do not "Like" Facebook right now. At all.
I deleted my FB account a week or so ago. For me, I didn't like where the company was heading so it was a matter of principle.
when you choose to create your facebook profile in germany,you have to read, understand and agree to text with about 70.000 characters...
i just read an article by a lawyer about this.
you can not disagree with some terms. for example facebook will be able to give away some of your personal informations (name, sexe, personal facebook number, ...)as they want.
For future reference, since I've been asked a few times about this, I joined Facebook in June 2007.