I’m a pretty open dude. My job responsibilities also lead me to leaving a tremendous number of “electronic footprints” out there — mainly so I can help and understand and empower others to navigate that online aspect of their lives.
Twitter giving my tweets to the Library of Congress? That’s okay, I wish they’d ask, but if my inanity will befuddle a future anthropologist — well that’s a little cool.
But some settings are a bit creepy. And Facebook is the creepiest of all. Not that you’ve ever been able to trust Facebook with your privacy — but it’s now gotten a whole lot worse — they will be using your friends to share everything with advertisers that you have chosen to keep private.
These were the defaults presented to me seeing this for the first time. After I’ve gone and pretty much restricted everything to just friends.
Even worse, if your friends use “instant personalization” ? You’ll have to explicitly block the applications they allow — at least according to Facebook themselves:
If you’ve never signed up with Facebook, don’t do it now.