Facebook & Privacy: Should We Be Concerned?

In short, yes.  If you quickly want to see how much information on Facebook you are making public, go to the ReclaimPrivacy.org website, and follow the easy instructions there, and you’ll know in less than a minute how much of your information on Facebook is now available for the general public to view.

We should be concerned about how Facebook is handling information that we assumed would be private when we signed up.  The problem isn’t so much that some of the information we put on Facebook is available to the public, it is that Facebook has repeatedly changed the default rules on what it makes public.  When I signed up on Facebook 2 or 3 years ago, virtually all the information I posted there was private by default.  That was one of the big selling points of the site: Connect with friends and share information in a private fourm.

If I signed up today, virtually all the information I post would be public by default.  Not only that, but if I clicked “OK” on the different “information dialog boxes” that appeared over the past year telling me how the Facebook’s default privacy setting were changing, virtually all my information would be public now as well.  That is very concerning.

To find out what you’re exposing to the public internet, go to: http://www.reclaimprivacy.org/

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