Define the Parameters of Your Privacy

Marrying privacy and social networking may seem terriblyunintuitive. How can you be social and open, and yet protect your privacy? Well, just because you are choosing to share some information with a select group of people does not necessarily mean that you want to share everything with everyone, or that you are indifferent about whetherthe information you share is visible to all. Facebook, in particular, has drawn unwanted attention in connection with various privacy concerns. If you have used Facebook for a while, you may have noticed advertisements that incorporate your friends’ names or photos associated with them. Facebook does provide privacy controls for you to customize the types of information available to thirdparty applications. If youlook at the Facebook Ads tabof the privacy controls, though, you’ll notice that it doesn’t give you any way to opt out of the internal Facebook Ads. Instead, it states (alarmingly) that “Facebook strives to create relevant and interesting advertisements to you and your friends.”
Approach Tattletale Quizzes With Caution
For many users, one of the primary attractions of Facebook is the virtually endless selection of gamesand quizzes. And part of their allure is their social aspect. In the advergames, you compete against your friends; through the quizzes,you learn more about them while being briefl y entertained. The ACLU exposed problems with how much information these quizzes and games share, however. Typically, when a Facebook user initiates a game or quiz, a notice pops up to declare that interactingwith the application requires opening access to information; the notice also provides the user the opportunity to opt out and cancel, or to allow the accessto continue. The permission page clearly informs the userup front that allowing “access will let [the application] pull your profile information, photos, your friends’ info, and other content that it requires to work.” Under the circumstances, you may wonder (as the ACLU has) why a game or quiz application would “require” access to your friends’ information in order to work.
Topic of post Define the Parameters of Your Privacy.