IMAGE LIKELY TO BE REMOVED BY PHOTBUCKET. AGAIN. SO I WILL SAVE THEM THE TROUBLE. SORRY.
Everyone knows about Facebook's latest privacy violations at this point, which this time, has more than your average privacy zealots up in arms. Matt McKeon's visualization The Evolution of Privacy on Facebook drives the point home more effectively than a million pontificating editorials.
A couple of excerpts from my piece on Redroom.com
In a nutshell, they modified their Terms of Service - again - so that pretty much everything you once thought was private isn't anymore, and launched their "Instant Personalization" strategy, chockablock with clever, social-sounding features and concepts such as "open graph," "social plug-ins" and "connections" all designed to make you feel part of something bigger and more and edgy and important.
And to save you having to so much as think about it, they signed you up (or opted you in). You can still opt out of some things if you have the time and wherewithal. You can also learn calculus, a foreign language and climb Kilimanjaro if you want to. It's just as easy.
One of the things you ought to be really grateful for, is that Facebook's new caching policy now allows developers to store their users' Facebook data permanently. So your personal data is now in the hands of any Facebook developer, presumably scrupulous, of course, even if you didn't sign up for the application. All it takes is a bored, self-obsessed friend taking yet another stupid, annoying quiz and broadcasting the results. Developers get data on friends too. You agreed to that somewhere in the fine print once. You did. You use Facebook, right?
And...
Caring about your privacy, according to Paul Carr, on TechCrunch, generally makes you the asshole in a piece titled "NSFW: Facebook Breached My Privacy, And Other Things That Whiny, Entitled Dipshits Say." In the only intelligent sentence in a diatribe of self-aggrandizing crap, Carr claims to be "a firm believer that Facebook et al have an obligation to act to defend a person’s reasonable assumption of privacy."
Given that Carr would brand you a whiny, entitled idiot to have any reasonable privacy assumptions to begin with, the most I could garner from his privacy be damned utopia was don't do anything you don't want the whole world knowing about, or else destroy anyone or anything that might serve as evidence. And if that fails, cry and beg Facebook to help you.
Robert Scoble asks: "Just what are you doing that needs to be so damned private? Are you having sex inside Facebook? Doing illegal drugs? Cheating on your wife? Damn, your Facebook life must be SO interesting!" To which I respond: "That's the whole point. It's none of your fucking business."