I don’t use many applications on Facebook – and certainly don’t join in the fun and quiz apps – due to concerns about privacy and data-mining.

I’m not sure how well understood these issues are by most FB users – and it takes some work to read up and understand it all.

This quiz put together by the ACLU really helps you understand just WHAT information you agree to expose (your own AND your FB friends) when you give access to an FB application.

I understand the trade-off between a content/amusement provider (their app) and me (my time, attention, information) – and the concepts behind the data-mining and customer profiling to enable highly targeted advertising -but given that we mostly have no idea who these app providers are – how do we make an informed choice of whether to expose our (and our friends’) data to them?

Bottom line:

• Make sure you understand and carefully set the privacy options in your FB Profile – ref: 10 Privacy Settings Every Facebook User Should Know (note that this is from early in 2009 and there have been changes to the FB privacy options since the – but it’s still a good guide).
• Don’t put sensitive information into your profile: e.g. remove the year from your birthday – better still don’t display it at all and better still don’t fill it in correctly
• Assume that FB apps suppliers are in general sleazy marketeers who want to harvest all your and your friends’ data and don’t trust them unless/until you know for sure they are sound and trustworthy (in most cases it’s not possible to verify this)

Further Thoughts:

Perhaps I am overly sensitive (paranoid!) about this issue (I also reject store “loyalty cards” for similar reasons) – but I get the impression that most FB users have no idea how exposed their own (and their friends’) data/info is on Facebook.

Note: I have quite a lot of personal information (blog entries, tweets, photos, contact details) available on the public Internet. This data/info is available to anyone who cares to look at it – and should someone wish to stalk me they could access it all. I don’t perceive this as a (significant) threat because I don’t think there’s value in doing the work to gather that data. Paradoxically, whilst Facebook “protects” one’s information and only allows access to “your friends” (and itself of course!)  – by exposing this info to “3rd party application developers” companies are able to hoover up and aggregate lots of information about you (and your friends!) and use it to profile and target you.

I’m very interested in others’ comments on this.

• Did you take the ACLU quiz? What did you learn?
• Do you inherently trust FB apps?
  • If not – why do you (continue to) use them?
  • If so – why?
• General comments on the topic
• Should I order a tin foil hat?
• Maybe you agree with Scott McNealy who in 1999 said “You have zero privacy anyway. Get over it.”

Let me know what you think.

**Note: I disabled comments on here (Wrodpress Blog) due to all the comment-spam – comment via Twitter or FB please