'Facebook privacy': an oxymoron?

Facebook's 2010 privacy policy is longer than the US Constitution minus the amendments, I read in the New York Times' revealing map on Facebook and privacy issues - one of the hottest topics right now. As the BBC notes, 'the blog SearchEngineLand reported that anyone who typed the query "How to quit..." into Google got as their number eight automated result "how to quit Facebook". It followed results for how to quit smoking, your job and drinking.'

On the, erm, face of it, Facebook appears to care for users' privacy; in fact, however, the 50 privacy settings and a total of about 170 options not only make it hard for many users to ensure that they have not missed something vital, but, crucially, fail to offer users the option to control aspects of their accounts that matter most. Many users have found, to their dismay, that Facebook allows third parties to share information (including posts) from their accounts without the users' knowledge, let alone consent. Despite Facebook's hypocritical claims that privacy is paramount, European data protection officials have deemed the social site's recent privacy changes 'unacceptable' - and they certainly are: as the New York Times points out, the recent changes mean that users have to opt out of certain 'choices' if they wish to keep certain information private, which makes much of the information stored in private accounts public by default.

Click to enlarge. Image source: the New York Times