A Serious Post About Privacy

If you are serious about keeping your personal information private and want to prevent corporations from using your personal data or taking advantage of anything you post on the internet all you have to do is post a note that states that you're not going to put up with this shit anymore. After posting the note you will receive all the peace and privacy you could ever want when you go and live in the woods without internet or human contact as this is the only way to achieve true privacy. You may be laughing but I am being completely serious (hence the title of this post) about the very important matter of privacy on the internet. Lately there has been a social virus infecting Facebook status updates across the globe. Those afflicted have been mindlessly posting copy and pasted 'legal' statements declaring sole rights to the things they blab on the internet or upload in the form of visual media and so on and so forth. These poor afflicted souls, whose symptoms present with apparent cerebral damage, ironically were most likely infected due to a lack of activity in the left cerebral hemisphere and frontal lobes. To guard against infection by this social virus you only need to spend a few minutes exercising your left cerebral cortex and frontal lobes. I recommend learning about privacy on Facebook as a means of not only exercising those portions of your brain but also immunizing yourself against viral panic that so often spreads through status updates.

You may have heard the anecdote about the picture-perfect family that discovered that their gorgeous family portrait had been taken from Facebook and used on a European billboard. These people did not have any sort of privacy notice up to protect their stuff- but they didn't have to. The company that made the decision to use that image made the conscious decision to steal from that family. The company was not in the right and is legally liable for theft. The family that was stolen from has every right to file a personal lawsuit against the company. No, short of not posting pictures at all, you can't prevent everyone from potentially stealing photographs or other media from your social networking page but you can easily limit the number of people who have access to that data by changing the privacy settings on your account or even on each individual post. If you want to make sure pictures of your toddler taking a bath are viewed by no one but family members you can easily adjust the settings to let you do that. I recommend you try messing with the settings for a few minutes of both permanent and per-post privacy selections.

But it's not just your pictures you want to protect. You want to protect your personal information as well. You don't want any random person armed with nothing more than Google to be able to dig up that you are a forty year old male living in the Denver area who checks into the local park via Foursquare every day when you walk your dog and that you're into both the Twilight Saga and competitive eating competitions and oh- this ten-digit number looks like a phone number. Change your general privacy settings so that only friends are privy to such information. You also don't want the company you work for to know that you weren't really sick on friday? Well, the easiest way to do that is to not post anything incriminating. But that can be difficult to sort out so the next best thing would be to not be 'friends' with or make links to the company you work for or be friends with other people that work there. You could try to exclude them through privacy settings but I wouldn't recommend it.

You may have also heard that Facebook steals data such as your likes and dislikes and sells it to advertisers.   Or that Facebook uses your information to customize things for you so they must just have a big database full of information that they can look at all they want and do whatever they want with. That's not true. Facebook does collect data- but only in the ways explicitly stated in their Privacy Statement. I recommend reading through it. If you find something that you are not okay with them doing then the only way to prevent that is to delete your account. If you want to be informed if they change the privacy statement simply 'like' the Facebook Site Governance page.  But despite what the fear-mongering stories you have heard would want you to believe people at the Facebook HQ are not looking at a list of stats next to your name telling them everything about you. The guys at the Facebook HQ are looking at aggregate data encompassing millions of users of which you are only one small plot point. Because the truth is that you're not special enough for anyone to want to spy on you specifically.

You may also have heard that Facebook is now a publicly traded corporation. You likely heard this in the context of: "Oh my god! Facebook is publicly traded that means they're going to be even more evil now!" In fact, the opposite is true. Facebook is now a publicly traded company and that means they now have shareholders that they must answer to whenever they do anything that might cause public backlash.

What you probably haven't heard is that it's not Facebook itself that you should be afraid of. It's the games you should be afraid of. You know how every time you decide to check out a new game you get a prompt asking you if they can use data from your page and your friends page and maybe even store cookies and other data on your computer? Have you ever read that particularly closely or even thought anything much about it other than that it was an annoying page between you and playing a new game that only required a simple click to get on with the game and not any actual comprehension of what they were asking? Unfortunately without clicking 'okay' you're not going to be able to play that game. Why? Because the makers of the games don't want to make free games and hope that you deign to give them some money in exchange for 'premium' pixelated items. They want to make money- period. And it's not just the games that want to steal your information. It's those cute little inspirational e-card applications, too. Any application or game that asks for some of your information doesn't just want to take your profile picture and put it on your little virtual farm. They want to know everything you're willing to let them have.

I encourage you to do everything you can to help protect your information and privacy but you have to remember that these are the two most important things: Firstly, if you are worried about other people finding out a particular fact about you- don't post it. Second, if you want true privacy all you have to do is click delete otherwise you have to make due. (But if you're really worried about your privacy you shouldn't just click delete to get rid of your Facebook you should also avoid MSN and Live, Google and all Google products and services, and try especially hard to avoid the worst culprit that is Yahoo and all it's products and services.)

Congratulations! You've now exercised your entire cerebral cortex and frontal lobes and prevented a viral infection that could have caused brain damage. Next time you see some fear-mongering 'pass it on' warning take a minute and use your brain and maybe a little fine motor control to click over to Google and look up whether people are spreading lies and misconceptions again.