The privacy issue battle is going on between Facebook, users like us, and laws that have been written to protect the rights to hide information that you don’t wish to share publicly or with 3rd party affiliates.
Before you succumb to the almighty Facebook entity, think about how this effects what type of position you are placed in both personally and professionally. More importantly though, exactly what information have you decided to share that you’re now at risk of without first placing yourself as the arbitrate? Believe it or not, Facebook isn’t the culprit unless you’ve dropped on your knees and decided to lie your head directly in the guillotine.
You don’t want Starbucks to know who you are and what type of coffee you ordered? Hope you didn’t use a credit or debit card with that purchase then. Your name and address now belong to one of the leading masters of portable-cup-of-java-necessity that we’ve all wasted way too many funds on. Personally, they have me listed at least a few times per week when I don’t opt for a cheaper method of supreme caffeine. 
If you Tweeted or Facebooked your favorite cup today, don’t worry…there aren’t enough privacy collectors manually inputting your special tastes into a database, or secret scripts that will strip all your personal information away and send it off to competing coffee brewers. If you really want the World to know about your coffee obsession, you need to put more work into it and start marketing! Set up a coffee Web site, host a blog or two, serve out a few fantastic coffee-related freebies and unique finds. You might just have a chance of landing somewhere in the great Google coffee cache with millions of competitors.
Don’t want your boss to know that you called him an asshole? Keep your profile limited to friends and family, and no one at work will even know. Don’t put anything on Facebook that you think will detriment your self-worth or impair your ability to continue on with life struggles in peace without 3rd-party intervention. With great power, comes great responsibility…or was that quote already used somewhere before?
Although I’m self-taught at design, writing, and art while not-so-secretly hiding myself as WebSpinstress, I also excel in marketing, advertising, promotion, and market research. And here’s the biggest secret I’ve learned while tumbling down my 12 year hill pretending that I have the specific noteworthy traits to help carry me on to a full career in doing so: no matter how important you think you are (because you are you of course, and I’m not denying that you think you’re important), you’re only a number, always a number, and sometimes either a relevant number that gets a little checkmark somewhere or a rare number that no one decides to include because it doesn’t affect the masses. Top businesses that are backed by investors are all about numbers – whether it’s larger numbers printed on thin green pieces of paper that we deem to be a sufficient method of currency, or numbers that fulfill a needed gap in the market with successful trends and research to substantiate a low-risk probability for funding a new upcoming venture. However, with all our powers combined…nope. Can’t go there. Bad images, thanks to Faustus’s lovely post on kids shows.
The Internet was built with a concept of having greater connectivity and has only greatly expanded since social networking became the standard of sharing new information. Before then, we had user groups, websites, forums, and maybe a few contacts that actually had a personal email address outside of their working lives. Facebook is nothing more than a popular false friend – one that we all have let into our lives, sending you “matched” interests that your real friends and contacts have already discovered or pertaining to other information that you’ve already offered that has been linked as similarly pertaining to. When you “like” a link that a friend liked already or shared something that has already been passed around, you’re merely marketing like Facebook does, only with a little more information as to why you found something interesting and what your next steps taken will be. Facebook is past its prime in the virtual World, struggling to maintain its ability to steer a structured course between man and business. You might as well hold on for the ride because eventually battle horses get shot down and we’ll all scatter away quickly to form a better and stronger legion, with even more personal information leaked once again…my guess it that somehow it will be based on the superior powers and versatility of bacon.
