How To Protect Your Privacy On Facebook
October 30, 2007 Internet, Technology
There’s been quite a bit of talk about privacy concerns at Facebook recently since last week when the general public learned that employees have been seeing what profiles people look at. In the days that followed there have been cries of foul and others shouting about “breach of privacy”. So, in an effort to help people with their privacy concerns, I’m going to tell you how to keep yourself out of Facebook’s data collection system: Don’t use Facebook.
Every website has logs that tell us who is connected, when, and (in some cases) for how long. That’s billions of websites that collect, at the very least, an IP address. What do people do with this information? It depends on the person.
I’ll admit that I’ve been collecting information on my readers ever since this blog started. Why? So that I can see what posts are popular, who comes here more often, and how long people stay. By looking at this data in an aggregated form, I’m able to change my writing style to suit the people that actually read my content. This also gives me plenty to work with in terms of topics as the most popular posts are often the ones I expect the least amount of readership for. Heck, if it wasn’t for this type of data analysis, I’d likely still be writing about things that nobody cares about (not that I have a huge readership to lose). Would I ever sell this information? No. Would I ever use this information against somebody? Only if you try and hack my site.
Privacy is a very big concern to millions of people and I agree that it’s something that we should keep an eye on, but every internet user needs to understand that no matter where you go, and no matter what you do, your online actions are recorded. Did you go to a website and add something to a shopping cart, then leave before giving out credit card information? Web administrators can ask this question and get an answer. Did you talk about baseball with a friend on MSN? Web administrators can know this, too. Heck, they may even have a record of what you said. Do you check your account balances online during your lunch break at work? Not only does your bank know this but, chances are, your employer knows this, too.
99% of the time, the only thing administrators know about us is an IP address. This rarely tells anybody anything unless you’ve also given out personal information that can be matched to that IP. Signing up for an account on Facebook gives that company the ability to match a name with an IP. Surfing some obscure blog (like this one) gives me just an IP. The only way I could ever figure out who you were was if you left a comment, and that might not be enough for me to figure out who you are.
So the fact that a handful of Facebook employees are querying the database to find out who’s looking at their profiles, or who has the most popular profile on their site is nothing. The company has a solid record regarding protection of our privacy, and nothing has been lost or given away. If you’re really worried about someone knowing what you’re doing on their website, then I strongly suggest you stop visiting websites. Not just Facebook, but all of them. Because no matter where you go, someone knows you stopped by.
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[...] said, “to keep yourself out of Facebook’s data collection system: Don’t use Facebook.” In this post, he reminds us that it is not just Facebook, but all sites that have the ability to do [...]