How to Get Your Privacy Back from Facebook

[BridgeTheGap]

Every time privacy policies are tweaked at Facebook, you should be worried. The company is looking for new ways to make money, and in this day and age that means selling you things. And all of those personal details you've entered into your Facebook account are the keys to the monetization kingdom. Maybe that works just fine for you. That's not the problem. As users, we ought to have a clear choice and we don't. That's the problem. Since the most recent changes this month, we've been bumping into all sorts of sharp commentary on Facebook privacy and helpful guides to getting your privacy back. Here's the best of what we've found:

Want to get right to it and restore your privacy settings right now? Here's Valleywag's How to Restore Your Privacy on Facebook. And here's Mashable's guide to Disabling "Instant Personalization."

Perhaps the best analysis of the recent changes came via the Twitter account of tech-guru Anil Dash: "Will someone ask why he doesn't use Facebook's default privacy at F8 tomorrow? If it's not good enough for him then why's it OK for us?"

Here's a creepy tool: Want to know what data Facebook published about you? It's a sluggish tool, since it seems the entire internet is there typing in usernames, but here it is: http://zesty.ca/facebook/.

http://www.utne.com/Science-and-Technology/How-to-Get-Your-Privacy-Back-from-Facebook.aspx?utm_content=04.28.10+Sci-Tech&utm_campaign=Emerging+Ideas-Every+Day&utm_source=iPost&utm_medium=email

[zazen]

1. thank you SO much n/t

[LittleGirl]

2. want your privacy back?

Just disable your account and let go. Facebook is not about privacy. It's a social network and keeping private is not what 'networking' is about. If you want privacy, don't network. Period. End of subject.

[Gormy Cuss]

3. Nothing about a "social network" requires that one provide information to marketers

or other third party entities without express consent. FB's getting flack for changing the privacy settings by default. That's the issue.

[benEzra]

5. The problem with that...

is that Facebook provides an invaluable service by allowing you to remain connected with your friends, even though you may now live on opposite ends of the country, and share in each other's lives in a non-overbearing way.

What Zuckerberg and the rest of Facebook's leadership fail to grasp, though, is that the struggles, hopes, dreams, and fears that I share with friends I've known for 20 years are NOT the same level of information I am willing to share with some marketing firm in Peoria, or with a nosy neighbor, or with my employer's HR department, or with every stranger with an Internet connection.

Zuckerberg seems to think that if I'm willing to tell a close friend about a relationship struggle or a medical problem or a personal weakness, that I'm OK with that information being shared with anybody who pays him for it. That is not the case.

[Q3JR4]

4. I set up my facebook privacy the other day based on

suggestions at http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2010/04/how-opt-out-facebook-s-instant-personalization">this website.

If that doesn't do it for you you can always http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=16929680703">permanently delete your facebook account.

Q3JR4.