Privacy? Who needs it?
Every time I get a credit card bill in the mail, I keep the one page with my details on it, then shred the rest. I cut up old cards into little tiny shards. I shield the PIN pad on the bank machine to prevent cameras from recording my finger movements. I don’t give my SIN to pretty much anyone. I check my bank account almost daily to make sure that no one else is accessing it, or my credit cards. I’d like to think I do almost everything possible to keep my info to myself. Except for one small detail: I am a member of three social networks, which I update daily.
I kind-of ignored all the FB privacy stories until just recently, thinking that I didn’t have enough on there to give myself away. But recently, the strangest people have been popping up in the “People you may know” box on my profile. They’re all sources of mine from stories in the past. But some of these people are old sources, from ancient email accounts and stories that were not published under my name. This kind of creeped me out. How the hell did they associate me with those people?
Alas, a little digging online revealed the rather pedestrian answer: Facebook is utilizing its “people you may know” networking capacity more than it used to, in order to tempt people into building bigger networks. They are doing this by going back to the permission you originally gave them to mine your email account for contacts who might also be on Facebook. So the story sources might not have been in my email account, but my email remains in their account, so voila! They appear on my profile page. Mystery solved.
This all goes back to the recent FB privacy stories about the new privacy settings recently unveiled to site users. FB says they simplify the privacy-settings process, but critics charge that really, FB is just trying to make people share more of their personal information in a bid to better compete with Twitter. Either way, I’m kind of glad it happened, in that I didn’t fully realize before the extent to which I’m constantly giving away my presence online. I’m not going to stop using the site, but I think I’ll be more careful about what I share, and how I share it, in the future.
