Fear Facebook - What people don’t see

I’m using Facebook just like another 62 million people. It’s really a nice technology and a good way to get in touch with your friends and people you haven’t seen for quite a while, but I use it with great care. Facebook is a huge personal information database, nothing else. Of course there’s a privacy agreement you accept with Facebook meaning they can’t disclose your personal details and informations, but it’s not that rock solid:

“Facebook may use information in your profile without identifying you as an individual to third parties. We do this for purposes such as aggregating how many people in a network like a band or movie and personalizing advertisements and promotions so that we can provide you Facebook. We believe this benefits you. You can know more about the world around you and, where there are advertisements, they’re more likely to be interesting to you. For example, if you put a favorite movie in your profile, we might serve you an advertisement highlighting a screening of a similar one in your town. But we don’t tell the movie company who you are.”

“We may use information about you that we collect from other sources, including but not limited to newspapers and Internet sources such as blogs, instant messaging services, Facebook Platform developers and other users of Facebook, to supplement your profile. Where such information is used, we generally allow you to specify in your privacy settings that you do not want this to be done or to take other actions that limit the connection of this information to your profile (e.g., removing photo tag links).”

“We do not provide contact information to third party marketers without your permission. We share your information with third parties only in limited circumstances where we believe such sharing is 1) reasonably necessary to offer the service, 2) legally required or, 3) permitted by you.”

As you can see, the Facebook policy you accept is opened to personal information sharing. We can read that Facebook don’t provide contact details to third party marketers without your permission, but the reality is that often the default options are set to allow the sharing of your profile’s details. Most people don’t know they have to remove the option in their profile manually. You also agree to receive targeted Ads corresponding to your profile.

One thing I don’t like about the term of service agreement is that particular sentence:

“We share your information with third parties only in limited circumstances where we believe such sharing is 1) reasonably necessary to offer the service [...]“

What’s the notion of “reasonably necessary? reasonably can be quite questionable and my notion of what’s reasonable ain’t probably the same as Facebook.

The whole lesson to learn about this Facebook personal information sharing is that most people profiles are gold mines for advertisers and governments. It’s a personal information database people are creating themselves having fun! I bet there’s a lot of people ready to pay for that database. Imagine: on most profiles we find pictures, what you like (movies, drinks, interests, music, etc.), your friends, your age, sex, date of birth, marital status, political views, school attending, work place and there’s many more. I can think of million and million of companies or even governments that would be more than happy to get that valuable database. Even though Facebook is not disclosing too much information at the moment, we can bet money will do it’s dirty job and make your information available to more and more people. Be careful with what you put on your profile as it can one day get in the hands of people you don’t want.

There’s not just the personal information’s selling that matter: Facebook is a computer software and computer softwares are open to hacking as usual. You never know what can happen with that database.

Continue to use Facebook, it can be really nice but just remember that what you put on there can fall into hands you might not want…