Matt McKeon has created an interactive infographic which takes a look at the evolution of privacy on Facebook. He starts with the terms of service for 2005, and brings it forward in time up to April 2010. Given the nature of the data, the graphic is somewhat open to interpretation. However, the trend is very evident. Personally, I like how the radial nature and concentric circles of the infographic work very well.
The point that Matt McKeon is making is to check your privacy settings and make sure that they are set to a level that you are comfortable with. He still likes and uses Facebook.
However, Facebook hasn’t always managed its users’ data well. In the beginning, it restricted the visibility of a user’s personal information to just their friends and their “network” (college or school). Over the past couple of years, the default privacy settings for a Facebook user’s personal information have become more and more permissive. They’ve also changed how your personal information is classified several times, sometimes in a manner that has been confusing for their users. This has largely been part of Facebook’s effort to correlate, publish, and monetize their social graph: a massive database of entities and links that covers everything from where you live to the movies you like and the people you trust.
Recent studies indicate that young adults are actually more vigilant about monitoring their online reputations on facebook and other social than their older counterparts. Check out this blog post by a recent Harvard grad (with some great citations and external links) about how the tell-all generation (those 18-29-years-old) are learning some discretion, at least in their online behavior:
http://stevenduque.com/2010/05/facebook-privacy-the-tell-all-generation-learning-discretion/