How hard is it to be private on Facebook
As a follow-up to my post about doing your friends and family a favour by deleting your Facebook account, I asked some of my friends and family if they were aware of Facebook's privacy settings and whether they had read the privacy policy.
Not one had! Given that Facebooks privacy policy is 5,830 words long - longer than the US Constitution, according to the New York Times (who also say that Facebook's privacy-related FAQ adds up to more than 45,000 words) - most people can be excused for not bothering to read it. Of those who do read the policy, but who don't understand it, the 45,000 words in the FAQ's are more likely to baffle than inform.
One of my family members has exposed a huge amount of personal information on Facebook. All three parts of her full name, her spouse's name, her email address, date of birth, place of employment, city, country and, by looking at her friends it's easy to see the names of her children and grandchildren along with a lot of information they have exposed. Any of us who are used to the Internet and who understand the privacy issues that can occur would be inclined to do a facepalm and dismiss her as somewhat stupid. I suspect she has more in common with the 4 million other users of Facebook than she has with those of us who know we need to be careful about privacy settings and policies.
So, she asked me to help her secure her Facebook account. "I'm not interested in social networking", she said, "I only want my family to see anything."
Trying to help her work through the myriad settings is next to impossible now that I no longer use Facebook, but I found some articles that help:
How To Put Facebook On A Privacy Lockdown (with screenshots illustrating what to do).
"Even if a user changes all the settings on the privacy section of the site, certain pieces of information will still be shared across the site unless a user takes further action. For example, under the Account Settings option, in the Facebook Ads tab, two options are automatically turned on to share some information with advertising networks and friends. Anyone who wants to keep this information private must uncheck the boxes in that tab.
And still, some information will no longer remain private because Facebook has also added a feature, called community pages, which automatically links personal data, like hometown or university, to topic pages for that town or university. The only way to disappear from those topic pages is to delete personal data from Facebook."
She came back to me to say she was totally confused by all the settings. I don't blame her - take a look at just how many settings a user has to wade through to set their privacy options on Facebook. The New York Times has an excellent visual representation of this mess: A Bewildering Tangle of Options. 50 settings with more than 170 options!
Then she asked me about how to delete her account. I gave her the steps I outlined here, but also directed her to the New York Times interview with Elliot Schrage, vice president for public policy at Facebook, who said:
"You can either deactivate or delete your account. When you deactivate, your profile information and content (photos, videos, etc.) are immediately made inaccessible to others on Facebook. However, this information is saved in case you decide to reactivate later. Some people leave Facebook for temporary reasons and expect their information and content to be there for them when they return. Messages you’ve sent or Wall posts you’ve made remain, but your name appears in black unclickable text (since your profile no longer appears on Facebook).
If you never want to use Facebook again, you can delete your account. Deletion is permanent, and the account can’t be reactivated. When we process your deletion request, we immediately delete all personal information associated with your account. Messages and Wall posts remain, but are attributed to an anonymous Facebook user. Content you’ve added is deleted over time, but isn’t accessible on Facebook, and isn’t linked with any personal information about you."
The bottom line is: don't expect all your data to be gone from Facebook's servers. It's also important to remember that any information that Facebook made available to others is still out there, on other servers, and other services that you may not have opted-in to. PC World has an interesting article called, "Facebook Keeps Telling Lies" that discusses how data shared by Facebook with Yelp was able to be scraped.
None of this is comforting for the woman I mentioned, who has unwittingly disclosed information about herself that she never wanted to be made public. Closing the door after the horse has bolted is hard. It's also a reminder to the rest of us that we need to take more care of our friends and family who don't understand how to use the Internet safely.
