What Facebook Privacy? Search & See What’s Public and A Facebook Profile Delete Method

Here is an interesting read on Mark Zuckerberg’s possible view on Facebook user’s privacy:

• Business Insider SAI: Well, These New Zuckerberg IMs Won't Help Facebook's Privacy Problems

As with anything, the above IM conversation content may be taken out of context, but given Facebook’s history with user content privacy there may be shreds of truth in the attitude indicated.

An interesting site that polls Facebook for publically available information:

• Openbook: YourOpenBook.org
• Note that a random search word set will bring up results when the page first loads.
• The search terms and the results can be surprising and even a bit shocking in what they reveal.
• About Openbook

A Facebook Group page dedicated to deleting a Facebook account:

• How to permanently delete your facebook account.

If there is one rule of thumb for the Internet it is that anything published to the Internet can never be taken back.

As a result, _everything_ that we do from the moment we start publishing on the Internet whether via Twitter, Facebook, or other online venue needs to be carefully considered.

For example, someone applying for a job may not remember a big party from a few years ago. But, a prospective employer found the descriptions and _pictures_ of the “fun” that night via an online forum. Depending on the employer, the activities of that evening may very well weigh in on their hiring deliberations.

Given Facebook’s history with “private” bits published on their site, and the Terms & Conditions on many other sites that can hold our data, we need to be truly “Internet Street Smart”. Essentially, that means that we read those T&Cs and keep close track of any site’s data privacy settings and what those settings do.

If we don’t agree with with the T&Cs as well as the site’s privacy policy, then we don’t sign up.

Hat tip: Derek Knight.

Philip Elder
MPECS Inc.
Microsoft Small Business Specialists
Co-Author: SBS 2008 Blueprint Book

*Our original iMac was stolen (previous blog post). We now have a new MacBook Pro courtesy of Vlad Mazek, owner of OWN.

Windows Live Writer