The virtual world seems to love discussing Facebook’s privacy concerns. We love circulating news about how third-party apps are selling our personal information, and about how the random geek is stalking us on Facebook:
 
 

More recently, the more geeky circles in the virtual community have been breaking into discussions about the Facebook Beacon, which most people haven’t heard off yet. Beacon is actually Facebook’s social form of advertising that shares your purchases or
other actions you take on an advertiser’s site with all your friends on
Facebook through their News Feeds. What has privacy advocates up in
arms, and advertisers skittish, about Beacon is the way it seems to be
spying on you as you surf the Web and then, on top of that, reporting
what you just did to everyone you know.

I personally think it’s really creepy, especially as I use Facebook a lot. In true geek style, I communicate with more than 95% of my personal acquaintances including family members over Facebook, from what we should get for birthdays and when we should meet and where.

But of course, being a non-anonymous blogger, I do not really have much Facebook privacy concerns. I mean, the information you’d find on Facebook about yours truly is really nothing compared with what you would find on this blog. Yeah, sure, the information here is not laid out as clearly as it is over my Facebook profile page, but it’s still there, in a lot more detail and a lot more juiciness, and anyone with stalker tendencies will probably find this blog more satisfactory.

Which is why I usually laugh when people ask me how I can be so openly rash on Facebook. What gets me is, people allow very high levels of information about themselves out. Do you
have to put all of your IM accounts on facebook? No, you don’t. Did you have to
install the app that tracks what your browser is doing? No, you don’t. Do you have to upload pictures of yourself at every juncture in your life? No, you don’t. It’s all choice. You can choose what sort of information you want to have out there about yourself, and when you’re not really given the choice, there are always tweaks to give it to you.

When I first started using Facebook, I thought it was a great way to privately share with friends pictures that I used to share with them over public photo sites like Flickr and Ikbis. I mean, you’re actually getting the choice to share your childhood snaps from 1994 with a long-lost-friends without having to think about the random strangers who will also check these snaps out. With use though, I discovered that there’s really so much more privacy to having your pictures viewed by random strangers on Flickr than by random acquaintances on your Facebook friends list. After all, the random strangers really don’t know enough about you to make anything out of your pictures, while the cousin you’ve only met once in your life seems to love showing your Facebook pictures to other random cousins who will later ask you about a picture of you, and you would go “Huuhhh, but you’re not on my Facebook buddies!”

But again, that’s why they created limited profiles, and that’s why so many people on my contact list are happily unaware of the fact that they don’t really have access to any of my information.

I’m really very much a Facebook fan, I think it’s a brilliant service that really solves one of my biggest problems- finding the time to stay in contact with the people I have accumulated as friends over the years. Facebook’s ability to cater to this need is really what a service is all about, and that’s why I’m not deleting (or deactivating, to be more precise) my Facebook account.