I do have a Facebook profile, but I wasn’t an early enthusiast and was only dragged into the fray grudgingly. I do see its benefits (I’ve reconnected with a lot of people I knew many years ago) but I’m very wary of its perils.
The folks who run Facebook are laughing all the way to the bank. They're making money hand over fist, and all they have to do is sit back and watch as the people who comprise their product volunteer tons of incredibly personal information. Then they sell access to that information to any advertiser or other business who wants it.
Facebook claims the information they surrender to these companies is anonymous, but it's not. Companies can combine the "anonymized" information from your profile with personal data gleaned from tracking cookies and other online traces to create dossiers about you that offer a level of personal detail the National Security Agency would envy.
If you make your date and state of birth available to the public on Facebook or any other online profile, there's a good chance most or all of your Social Security number can be predicted--especially if you were born after 1988 in a state with a small population.
Even if you prevent anyone but your friends from viewing your Facebook friends list, researchers can infer plenty of personal information about you from any of your Facebook friends who don't keep their friends lists private.
Facebook users obviously don't care that their privacy has been compromised. They clearly don't appreciate or understand the risk, in large part because Facebook still appears to be magical to them. (Arthur C. Clarke's famous line that "any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic" applies not just to Facebook but to Google's search algorithms and other successful Web services as well.)
That point is driven home by the results of a recent Harris Interactive survey that found a large percentage of social-network users willing to friend strangers and trust that their new "friends" would not misuse the personal information in the users' profiles.
The article is short and has a lot more, including tips on how to make your profile more “secure.”
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