"The Facebook Privacy Wars: What is Personal Data?" By: Curtis Silver

Obviously this topic is pretty hot, since its probably my third blog about it. But really, when is it gonna stop? When is the day gonna come when we don't have to worry about our "personal data"? I'm starting to wonder if we have any privacy at all.In this article, we learn that this ongoing fight to keep our information on the Internet private is stirring up a lot of chatter; but are we at fault? Is it our laziness that keeps us from reading the fine print which tells us that our personal info. is spread around the Internet?

"The thing is, as Loren mentioned in the video, no one reads the terms of service contracts. When you click the little check box and hit continue, you are agreeing to pages and pages of legalese that pretty much state you don’t have any personal data and you have absolutely no privacy on that site. They own it all. This isn’t true for every site of course, but a good majority of them."

Okay, side story: When I was in High School, my friends (the great people that they are), went on a random website that talks about..... (i'm sorry if you're offended)..bowel movements. They made up funny poems about our other friends and myself, but never told us. A few years after, I was playing around on the Internet and I googled my name. Random things popped up, nothing about myself, but then I came across this one site, so I clicked on it, and died laughing. Not only was my name on it, but so were my other friends, so it wasn't too embarrassing. And still today, IT IS ON THE INTERNET! But anyways, moral of the story is no matter what we put on the Internet, once is it up there, saved, okay'd, it is up there forever. For anyone to see. It's a scary thought; we really have NO idea what is up there.

Now that Facebook has given us the options to keep information private, we really need to go through the setting and figure out what you don't want for everyone to see and what you don't mind people seeing. Once information is out there it can be taken by anyone at any time. Social networks are for sharing our information with each other, obviously, but do you really want every single person across the globe locating your information?

Change your settings people.

http://www.wired.com/geekdad/2010/05/the-facebook-privacy-war-what-is-personal-data/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+wired%2Findex+%28Wired%3A+Index+3+%28Top+Stories+2%29%29&utm_content=Google+Feedfetcher