rjleaman

Oh, sheesh… so Facebook is changing its not-so-much privacy policies again??? Seems every time you login there, the sharing rules have changed. And always, it seems, in the commercial best interests of Facebook and its advertisers, rather than in the protective best interests of the social network’s users - especially the naive, the careless, and the very young and vulnerable.

Stowe Boyd gives a good breaksown of the new deal, and its implications, ending up thus:

My recommendation is to operate on a full publicy mindset, even if Facebook seems to be safeguarding various sorts of privacy in very convoluted ways.

Just pretend this is the Facebook privacy policy, and you can’t go wrong:

There is no privacy on Facebook. Everything you create, access, or share is public. The fact that you looked at a page, created something or deleted it, and any relationship you agree to is public. We reserve the right to do anything with any information we can capture about you, or any information you offer about yourself or any of your ‘friends’ on the system. We reserve the right to make anyone or any corporation a user of the system, and they can conceal their reasons for being there or their intentions for how they will use any public information about you or your friends, which is all inforrmation on the system because nothing is private, even when we use the work ‘private’. Private is public.

While I am an advocate for, and a believer in a more public, open, and transparent web, I am concerned at the Orwellian overtones in Facebook. … I am happy to be public, myself, but I would rather do it in a setting that feels like a bustling plaza, a place that seems dedicated to the principles of open social discourse, rather than a place that is strip-mining our social connection and selling it off to hucksters by the truck load.