Facebook & Privacy

I have a love/hate relationship with Facebook. I use it (voluntarily) almost every day, and I love the way it allows me to easily keep in touch with friends, re-discover old acquaintances, make new connections, and publicize items of interest.

However, I also lament the way that I have greatly reduced longer messages to close friends and, more importantly, fear the way that Facebook is revealing large amounts of personal information. For the former, I think I will just need to make email and phone calls a priority again, but for the latter, I have taken specific steps to preserve my privacy on Facebook.

10 Privacy Settings Every Facebook User Should Know should be required reading for all users of Facebook. Read this to learn how to set very specific privacy levels, such as limiting photo views to only certain groups of friends, preventing stories from showing up on news feeds, and controling who can post to your wall.

There is still the larger issue of the Facebook corporation itself having access to so much personal information, but short of avoiding social networking altogether, I haven't figured out a good solution to that one.