Thursday, February 19, 2009

Facebook privacy not guaranteed?

There's been a lot of debate about the security of information a user posts on Facebook. In a nutshell, the social networking website, Facebook, changed its user disclosure statement last week to state that even after you close your Facebook account, Facebook has the right to keep all of your profile content archived for future use. The concern over this has to due with EVERY other social networking and video/photo posting service never having such a disclosure in their privacy statements.

In my personal opinion, once you put something on the web, its out there in the public domain (with the exception of copywritten content, in which case you've appealed that the law protect your intellectual property from being used for someone else's monetary gain). Would I be pissed if a photo of mine wound up used in a Facebook marketing campaign? Sure, but this is happens all the time with web marketing services and at least Facebook is announcing they plan on doing it. Would I be angry if ads were to target me? Yep, which is why I don't add too much personal information. But there's actually other Facbook privacy violations that are much more potentially exploited. In the end, users need to be responsible for the content they put out there and be more aware of how to protect themselves.

I'm going to post some other links on the subject and let you investigate if you have concerns:


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