Facebook Privacy Concerns

Q: I use Facebook mostly for staying in touch with friends and family, but would like to use it for my business as well. But how can I keep my private life well… private?

A: You might think that putting the words privacy and social networking site in the same sentence makes it a bit… strange. After all, isn’t that the whole point of the social networking site – to well, put yourself out there, socialize, network, promote, market; all of which entails giving up on privacy, at least to some degree.

On the other hand, marketers realize that marketing Web2.0-style elevates privacy and security concerns to a whole new level. Fortunately, Facebook has a set of privacy-protection measures:

• Your profile information is only available to people who already have some type of relationship with you by either being your friends or belonging to the same network groups. All others might not even be able to find you on Facebook (if you set your search settings accordingly).
• Facebook blocs search engines and web crawlers from getting your full profile information. The only information visible to the search engines is your name, profile photo, and some aggregated information (such as number of messages on your Wall).

Facebook also offers various privacy options for your content. You can change them by going to Privacy Settings in your Facebook profile.

The nice things about Facebook Privacy Settings is that you can set different levels of privacy for different parts of your Facebook page. For example, you can specify that your profile can be seen by your friends, but not by your friends’ friends and only by some of your networks. You can go even further and specify who can view each section of your profile.

In a similar way, you can set your preferences for who can search for you and how you can be contacted; which ones of your Facebook actions and messages can be recorded in the News Feeds and on the Wall; and how much of your profile information make available to the applications you add to your Facebook page.

What you can’t control is information about you (favorable or otherwise) might be spread around with or without your help and there is very little you can do about it (sort of like gossip, I guess). Or as Facebook Privacy Policy warns users

…even after removal, copies of User Content may remain viewable in cached and archived pages or if other Users have copied or stored your User Content.

Then, of course, there are reports of Facebook profiles being hacked into, revealing private information to unauthorized third parties.

Speaking of the Third Parties. Serious social networking sites specify that they do not sell or otherwise share their users’ identification information (name, e-mail, address, phone, etc) with third parties, unless they have user’s permission to do so. So, for example, they won’t sell your name and e-mail to a marketer, but will share it with a credit card processing company if you make any purchases on these sites, such as membership dues.

Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and most other websites use cookies to keep track of your visits. But in fact, since most business sites (and some personal sites) nowadays use some form of web analytics (i.e. Google Analytics), they all keep logs of your visits and use cookies to identify visitors. If you strongly object to this form of data collection, you can always disable cookies in your browser or download BlockSite plugin for Firefox.

It is the user’s choice as to how much and what kind of information to put on their profiles. I would recommend a common-sense approach that applies whether you market your services online or offline – keep your nose clean and don’t mix business with personal life. With Facebook, it would mean setting up and periodically reviewing your privacy settings and being mindful when adding people to your Friends list.

Other good rules of thumb to follow include

• ensuring that your virus protection and anti-spyware/adware tools are current and running them often;
• completely logging out of your social networking accounts at the end of each session;
• limiting downloads of third-party applications to your Facebook account;
• if you click on an outbound link, make sure to verify their privacy protection and security features, especially if providing credit card information.

Technorati Tags: Facebook, social networking, internet privacy

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