I was surfing around The New York Times site, and a story about Facebook caught my eye.  For the full article, you can check out this link.

The main idea of the story was privacy on Facebook, and it dealt a lot with privacy settings on an individual's account, as well as what information is being given out to outside servers. 

For 15 of 19 information categories, Facebook sets a default setting of “share,” which means the information can be pulled out of Facebook and stored on servers outside its control. These 15 categories include activities, interests, photos and relationship status.

I don't know about you, but I feel pretty uncomfortable seeing that this info is being passed around without my knowledge, especially photos.  Further more, I'd like to know who exactly has this info, and what it's being used for.

The article pointed out other facts that I failed to even really take the time to think about:

For many members, “friends” now means a mish-mash of real friends, former friends, friends of friends, and non-friends; younger and older relatives; colleagues and, if cursed, a nosy boss or two. Everyone accepted as a “friend” gets the same access.

When the distinction blurs between one’s few close friends and the many who are not, it seems pointless to distinguish between private and public.

This article was featured last month, but it goes along well with what I've discussed so far.  We all remember the "New Terms of Agreement" debacle that happened a few weeks back.  In this article, Mark Zuckerberg (cheif exec. of Facebook) is trying to assure that the users have control over the content and how it's used.  Seems like a load of crap, Mark.

It is the users that make MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, and the slew of other social networking tools go 'round.  So logically, shouldn't we be the ones who have the say over the information that is present on these sites? 

The more developments I see in social networking technologies, the more uneasy I become.  The fact is that we don't really know what is being done with information we post online, and that can be a scary thought.