The Growing Privacy Concerns of Facebook

In the conclusion of Daniel Miller's book, Tales of Facebook, the author wrote about privacy issues concerning facebook. His analysis was that while there are privacy issues with facebook, much of what people put out on facebook is their own doing. He argued that there are legitimate cases of privacy violations, but these cases are becoming fewer due to new innovations with facebook's privacy controls. As time has went on facebook and its users have gotten somewhat smarter about privacy but issues remain. For example, when someone posts something on facebook it is forever "out there." This means that on some server in some server farm the information is stored, even if it was deleted. The accidental post by your friend teasing you on facebook isn't so private anymore. Search engines like google and yahoo keep the information even longer and often display results for keywords even if those entries were deleted on the actual website but when the person clicks on the link it is likely to take them back to the user's profile main page. As far as the law goes with facebook there isn't much regulation out there because this is a fast paced, rapidly changing environment that the law is just not able to adapt to. By the time new laws are wrote, voted on, and signed into law they are probably already antiquated. So for those people who do not care about people's privacy or who want to steal your identity, it is still relatively easy to stay ahead of the game. The good news is that if people consider facebook as a massive PR campaign about themselves and strictly control what information they put out there or allow to be put out there then they should be okay.http://articles.cnn.com/2010-05-13/tech/facebook.delete.privacy_1_facebook-users-privacy-settings-facebook-friends?_s=PM:TECH