Facebook has a long and tangled history with the concept of personal privacy. By its nature, Facebook opens two way window to the world, allowing you to see an enormous amount of information about other Facebook users and them to see an enormous amount of information about you. For many, the ability to see deeply into the lives of their friends and contacts is unendingly interesting. For marketers, that ability is absofreakenlootly amazing, so amazing in fact that some marketing firms will do almost anything to attain the ability including violating Facebook’s own privacy policies and the privacy laws of several nation states.

Earlier this month, Facebook took the unprecedented step of shutting down several games and applications which collect information about their subscribers. They did this because those application makers were selling the information they collected to large-scale marketing firms who in turn used that information to pad consumer profile dossiers and sold that data to their advertising clients. Scary enough eh?

To complicate matters, it’s not just your own privacy you need to protect. Facebook games and applications tend to be based on interaction between Facebook members and that requires allowing the application to extract information about your friends to create as complete a picture as possible of the web of personal networks that make up the Facebook universe.

Think about this for a second. One set of connections leads to another which in turn leads to other sets of connections. As with the concept of six-degrees of separation, designers of extremely popular games can eventually capture a fairly accurate snapshot of the entire population of Facebook users. In other words, you are not just protecting yourself; you’re helping to protect a large chunk of the world’s population.

Unfortunately, all the personal security in the world is useless unless everyone in that world also takes measures to protect themselves and their data, or, unless Facebook itself makes a serious crackdown on application makers and the marketers who pay for the data. While Facebook is making the effort, it is unlikely to be able to stem a tide that has already washed ashore. In other words, once the cat is out of the box it is very difficult to get it back in again.

Consumers have had the ability to protect themselves all along though most have no idea how to do that, aside from disconnecting entirely. So how, without fully opting out of the social networking scene does one protect their privacy while still enjoying use of popular applications and games? Here is a quick run-down of the personal privacy settings allowed by Facebook.

Friends Settings
If you look to the top right side of your Facebook screen, the furthest tab to the right is a drop-down menu marked Account. The first link under the Account tab lets you see your friend list. Placed in alphabetical order this link allows you to view and group your friends list in a number of ways. The default view shows friends you’ve recently interacted with. This allows you to visit your friends’ pages to see exactly how you interacted with them. It is not entirely accurate however. For instance, my girlfriend and I share and like each others posts regularly but I don’t see her name come up on my recent interactions list. Other views include All Friends, Recently Added and a variety of location and interest based options.

Beside each image and name is an X allowing you to “de-friend” or delete the person from your account. It should be noted that even though you might delete a person from your network of friends, interactions between you and them will remain active on Facebook servers forever.

The next link in the drop-down menu is for pages you might have established as part of a group or a business. There are likely few privacy concerns to be found here as legitimate businesses tend to operate in the open and if you’re running an illegal business with a Facebook group, you’re too stupid to worry about privacy settings anyway.

The third link in the Account drop-down menu, Account Settings is extremely important for establishing and maintaining privacy on Facebook. This is the area in which you can set what information is visible on your Facebook profile page. The Account Settings section is divided into four main areas, Basic Directory Information, Sharing on Facebook, Applications and Websites, and Block Lists.

Basic Directory Information controls how you want to present yourself to the world through your profile. This is the area that lets you say who can and can not see your news posts, your friends list, your hometown and current location, and other information about your present and past. By default, everything is set for everyone to see. Beside each option is a button allowing you to set preferences from “Everyone” to “Friends only”. Resetting your preferences has implications over who can and can not connect with you. These settings also have implications surrounding what information Facebook says it shares with third parties such as game and application developers. According to Facebook’s Terms of Service,

When you use an application, your content and information is shared with the application.  We require applications to respect your privacy, and your agreement with that application will control how the application can use, store, and transfer that content and information.  (To learn more about Platform, read our Privacy Policy and About Platform page.)[source: ]

That said, Facebook doesn’t have a lot of control over what application makers might actually do with your personal information once they get it. A recent study conducted by Microsoft India and the Max Planck Institute for Software Systems in Germany (link: PDF ) demonstrated that advertising networks use private information, including data indicating sexual orientation, to target advertising to consumers who have clearly been personally identified.

Facebook also gives you the ability to control the information application makers and game designers extract from your account though there is no way of actually verifying that privacy settings prevent marketers from gaining your information. You can however see when an application last extracted information from your account and what that information is.

At the bottom of the Privacy Settings page, accessed from the ACCOUNT tab, you can edit your Applications and Websites settings. The first screen you’ll see shows you the applications or games you most frequently use. Clicking on the name of the application will show you your last usage and will also show you information on the application developer. The more details link on that page shows you what information was extracted by the developer and when. Unfortunately, following up on this information is extremely time consuming as each application extracts data differently. Facebook thus lists each application separately and you the user must examine each specifically to see what was done when. Even more unfortunately, the only way to prevent such applications from extracting that information is to delete them from your account. You did, after all, give them permission when you signed up for their service.

Users of MySpace, FourSquare and other social media tools also face extraordinary privacy concerns. Most social media tools are built on sharing personal information with larger networks. As stated earlier, digital marketers live and die by that information. Perhaps the only true way to shield your privacy is to shun social networks but, for most of us who have become accustomed to gleaning information and entertainment through our social networks, that is hardly an option. The only real way personal information is going to be protected is at the platform level. In other words, the onus is on Facebook, MySpace and other interactive networks to guarantee their users’ privacy. Facebook did take a mighty swing at several application makers in a “big-stick” attempt to meet user privacy concerns but few fully believe that Facebook can actually prevent application developers from parceling and selling private info to marketing firms.

For now, check your own settings regularly, modify your passwords from time to time and be very, very careful who you allow into your personal information space.

Jim Hedger

Jim Hedger is an organic SEO and digital marketing specialist. Jim has been involved in the online marketing industry since 1998 and a SEO since 1999. Best known as a broadcaster, interviewer, content writer and search industry commentator, Jim is a frequent conference speaker and organizer. He hosts the search focused radio show Webcology on WebmasterRadio.FM and is a WebmasterRadio.FM conference interviewer. Jim brings a wealth of knowledge, experience, passion and creative thinking to each project. Preferring a teamwork approach, Jim strives to inform and train his clients and their staff to run and maintain their own search and social media efforts.

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