Can you really control Facebook?

The BBC article Clement has chosen is about measures settled by Facebook, the world biggest social network, to allow users to control their personal data.

People will be allowed to download all the data they uploaded onto the website.

Moreover, thanks to the “groups” feature, users will be able to share particular information with a specific circle of friends. But you cannot prevent other people to enter the group you have created, for instance if your friends invite their own friends into it.

Facebook brings also an answer about problems linked with phone connections to the website. Phone numbers privacy would be insured: “All of this information is private and is not shared with any friends or any third party”.

Facebook users are often unaware of the risks implied by the broadcasting of personal data.

You have no guarantee that these information won’t be sold to firms for example. Clement added that social networks were an efficient political weapon. Let us think to Obama’s campaign on Facebook: his page gathered more than three million people, which probably increased his popularity.

A student reacted to agree with the dangerousness of social networks. He said he was used to select the information he posts on the Internet, regardless to what the Facebook engineers claim about privacy.

Larry Magid, co-director of ConnectSafely.org, evokes “a sense of false security”. To my mind, the “groups” feature contributes to that. Actually, knowing that the information is shared with a restricted group of users, people feel reassured. Nevertheless, it hides the fact that data is preserved by Facebook and no one can surely know to what purpose it keeps them. You can easily imagine that they could be sold to industrialists, advertising executives, the police, governments or even religious leaders…

In my opinion, on the Web, confidentiality doesn’t exist. Facebook can look like Big Brother. Let us think about this young American banker who asked his boss for leaving work because of “family problems”. One of his colleagues denounced him with an irrefutable proof: a photo taken from Facebook showing the banker enjoying a Halloween Fest. He was dismissed.

Another problem deals with the possibility to withdraw from the system. Indeed, deciding to live Facebook doesn’t imply the suppression of your data…

So the best means to protect your private life seems not to join Facebook.

But if like me you want to go along with the crowd without worrying, you still can making easy choices such as allowing the access to your Facebook to your friends only; creating subcategories (family, colleagues and friends for instance); avoiding to post compromising photos that a recruiter is likely to see…

To conclude, you should be neither artless nor paranoid. After all, Facebook is above all an entertainment.