Facebook privacy… again?

December 11, 2009 by Bill Palmer

An email in my inbox this week notifying me that I’m eligible for a settlement over Facebook’s (literally) criminal behavior a couple years back came as a timely reminder of the fact that I just don’t trust those guys. It’s not that I think anyone over there is sitting around twisting their mustaches and wondering how they can screw us over next; it’s just that once a social networking service demonstrates that it thinks it’s okay to announce to the world that you just booked a flight on Travelocity, it’s hard to imagine their sense of right and wrong evolving to the point where you’d actually toss them your car keys any time soon. This week’s coincidental (?) announcement of new privacy settings for Facebook users also reminded me of another fact: I don’t care.

The latest hoopla seems to be centered around giving users the option of exposing more of their information and assets to the internet at large as opposed to just their friends. Sounds to me like Facebook wants to expose a little more of its goods to the search engines in the hopes of even more traffic and domination. Fine. Good. Go for it. Wake me when it’s over.

The implementation is clunkier than it should be. Yesterday I tried to visit someone’s Facebook fan page for work-related reasons, and was told that I had to choose my privacy settings before I could continue. Now that’s bad form, as any time you force someone to stop and do what you want them to, in a moment in which they were already intent on doing something else, you’re not going to have their full attention. So I just clicked on the most restrictive settings down the line, and added an item to my “to do” list that involves going back and taking the time to set them to what I actually want them to be. Which in my case will probably be “wide open to anyone who wants it.”

Why? That goes back to me not caring. Am I really worried that someone in the “outside world” is going to get a look at my profile picture? It’s usually the same one I’m using on Twitter anyway, and anyone can see that whether they’re registered for Twitter or not. My status updates? I’ve been blogging publicly since 2003. Then again, that’s the life I’ve chosen. Although there’s absolutely no reason why anyone would consider me a public figure, I do live (most of) my life in public. And the stuff that I don’t want read by strangers, I don’t put on Facebook either. Maybe that’s just me. After all, I do approve every friend request I get unless it’s an obvious fake or spammer, so the whole idea of Facebook only being my “trusted friends” went out the window a long time ago. Then again, just because I went you high school with someone fifteen years ago, that doesn’t make them trustworthy either – so I can’t help but wonder how many of your Facebook friends are people you actually trust.

Just don’t ask me to trust Facebook. Not after the Beacon fiasco. Not after some of the other nonsense they’ve tried to pull over the years. But I don’t distrust them either. After all, we all have “friends” that we trust not to steal our wallet but still wouldn’t give our bank account number to – which is why my bank account number isn’t on my Facebook page, if you know what I mean. So while I always do wonder just what they might be trying to pull this time when Facebook announces that they’re revising their privacy settings yet again, I just can’t wrap my head around what I’m supposed to do about it other than shrug and move on. I decided long ago that the benefits of using Facebook far outweighed the drawbacks of having to use a service that I don’t really trust, and that’s that. It’s also true of my bank, my cellphone carrier, and my search engine. Sometimes I don’t even trust Apple, depending on what day of the week it is.

My rule is that if I don’t want the world to know about something, I don’t write it down – and that includes typing it into a website. The kind of personal information that I wouldn’t want a search engine to have, or that I wouldn’t want the people running Facebook to have, is generally the same information that I wouldn’t want all my old “friends” from high school to have either.

Am I wrong here?