One of my friends brought this to my attention today (ironically through Facebook, thanks DJC!) and I thought that this would be a worthwhile piece of information to share.
Facebook have had a recent habit of tweaking privacy options under the guise of allowing users finer control over their personal information whilst the default settings have become progressively lax. I’m sure a stack of people haven’t even ventured into the privacy settings or have awareness that Facebook will automatically share information about yourself and your friends with Microsoft Docs, Pandora and Yelp.
In my opinion, personal information is one of the most important assets that we possess but it is also an important asset for social networking websites like Facebook. From a commercial perspective, Facebook will look for ways to capitalise on people being unaware of the default settings and sharing as much information as possible with its partners.
So what can you do to protect yourself?
There is a great little tool called “Facebook Privacy Scanner” from ReclaimPrivacy. Basically, you create a bookmark containing some JavaScript, login to Facebook and then launch the bookmark. You should then see the following appear at the top of the page:
Facebook Privacy Scanner
Now I already have my stuff locked down (as you can see) but when you run it you may get various warnings and some instructions on how to lock things down. After all, you don’t want to share all of your private information with the whole wide world – especially after Facebook founder, Mark Zuckerberg, was uncovered calling the site’s first users something rather unsavoury. ReclaimPrivacy also provides the source code for developers to get into the guts of things as well to entice people to keep the scanner updated.
So while social networking can be a great tool, remember that people are out to make money out of it and the more information you share the easier you make it for people to exploit your personal data.
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