Facebook Privacy & These Nonsense Permission Posts
- At June 5, 2012
- By Jon Berry
- In Blog / Social Media
Here’s the deal… Facebook can use anything that you post. It’s that simple.
Facebook is a free service that is completely optional for you to use. It is completely optional for you to share your feelings, photos, videos, location, check-ins, or anything else that you post to Facebook. Once you do so, you do not have protection of that content unless it is protected in your privacy settings. Even then, Facebook can use that content to show you ads, build new features that are content dependent, or otherwise analyze the content in order to customize Facebook around your interests. For instance, if you check in to a sushi restaurant, post photos of your beloved dragon roll, and then comment all about it with your friends, Facebook may show you ads for local sushi restaurants forever and ever. If Facebook ever comes out with a Sushi Finder app, you’re going to know about it because your data shows that you like sushi.
You may feel that is an invasion of your privacy, and I may feel that way too, but it’s not. Facebook data mining works a lot like when a bad guy gets arrested on TV. They have the right to remain silent, and anything they say can and will be used against them.
What you do have are options, including the option to not use Facebook.
You have privacy settings that allow you to control who can see, share, and post on your behalf. You have privacy settings to choose if you show up in search results or not. You have the option to be a ghost or to be completely open for all the world to see. You can change those privacy settings by going here: http://www.facebook.com/settings/?tab=privacy.
By posting a message to your Timeline forbidding anyone from sharing, archiving, or otherwise using the content you post has absolutely no bearing on the laws, rules, or terms of service that actually do apply to your privacy.
I’m not going to go into detail about Facebook’s Terms of Service or Privacy Policies, but I do encourage you to read and understand them, simply because you have already agreed to them by using Facebook. When you signed up, you checked a little box that says so…so you might as well go do that.
Here are the links:
Happy Reading!
