KQED: Facebook and Online Privacy

KQED Forum had a discussion around Facebook and Online Privacy this morning with Kara Swisher, Laura Sydell, and Marc Rotenberg.  The main question was whether Facebook's changing the user privacy policy to share user data with third party sites was going too far.  Although Facebook has been asking users to vote, but it's effectively abolishing the voting process while Facebook is looking to sell user data to its ad network affiliates.

You can listen to the full program.




It is interesting to listen to panelists raising all kinds of privacy questions:

• Does your data get deleted for good when you delete your Facebook account?
• What happens your friend has public profile while you have private profile and shared something personal with your friend and your friend shares it? (I wrote about this earlier.  Yes, your data is only as private as your least private friend is.)
• What about letting users buy their privacy by paying social network?
• If that's possible, how should social network determine whose data?
• What data belongs to you as your data when you interacted with a group of friends?
• What about letting users opt-in to selling their data for getting a cut of advertisement profit?
• What happens when Facebook changes the terms and condition to expand their data usage privilege? (the main question brought up by Marc Rotenberg)
• If Facebook switches to opt-in sharing for all users, is it still a social network or is it no longer a social network?
• When mobile activity is combined along with social network activity, how is that different from user tracking/surveillance?
• How do you know the Facebook app makers are sharing your data once they get access to your data?

What we know for certain is that price that Facebook users pay by lowering our data privacy has just increased.  Just like Google has increased their fee earlier this year by sharing data among Google services, Facebook is following up with similar move.

Are you going to manage your Facebook privacy setting more closely?  Any tip for other Facebook users?

Do you feel this way about Facebook privacy change?
Source: http://masalai.wordpress.com/2009/02/27/facebook-privacy-update/