Speaking as someone who uses Facebook as much as me (from a professional standpoint) I'm still suprised just how many people don't understand, choose to ignore or just don't know what level of privacy is available through Facebook.
It really is quite shocking the amount of profiles I can browse and look into - if I wanted to I could capture email addresses, phone numbers and worse, just like browsing an open telephone directory.
A new survey just published entitled State of the Net shows just how right I am, not only in the increased use and adoption of social networks like Facebook across households and also underlines some of the privacy problems that are currently associated with social networking.
One of the most interesting elements of the survey was just how many users are unaware — or don’t care — about privacy settings when it comes to social networks.
Consumer Reports says that one in four households with a Facebook account have users who aren’t aware of or don’t choose to use Facebook’s built-in privacy controls.
While that may give some credence to Mark Zuckerberg’s (now famous) “privacy is dead” declaration, it still makes you think, especially when you consider how basic information used on Facebook — like your full name and birthday — can be utilized in identity theft.
Also - 26% of parents on Facebook posted the names and photos of their children. How many parents understand that unless they have that information restricted to certain user groups that it is really public information?
That’s actually one of the more interesting aspects of Facebook’s new Open Graph; it isn’t that Open Graph necessarily has any different privacy implications, it’s just more evident how public many of Facebook’s settings really are.
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