In Defense of Facebook: Privacy Issues

Note: For a less—um—ranty take on the Facebook privacy issues, check out friend of the blog, “The Miller Times.”

The hoopla surrounding Facebook’s latest privacy gaffe is getting absolutely ridiculous.

People are organizing a “Quit Facebook Day” and a “Facebook Protest Day.”

Listen up folks, Facebook isn’t the problem.

You are.

If you don’t want the entire world to know that you just love the crap outta “Real Housewives of Atlanta” or every Nicholas Sparks book ever written, you should probably never, ever, ever, EVER put it online.

If we’ve learned anything in the last 15 years of ridiculous web-growth it’s that anything you put online is out there and it’s out there for good.

More than ten years ago I called in—note: CALLED in—to USA Weekend to ask a question about Jennifer Love Hewitt.

Even though they totally butchered my question to involve Jennifer Lopez and the word “sizzled”…that question is still out there on the interwebs.

That’s right, something more than a decade old and something that originated over the phone and in print is available online. So do you honestly think the things you punch in online aren’t going to haunt you?

Seriously folks, if you’re on Facebook and you have more than 100 friends, you’ve signed away your privacy.

Let’s be real here, you don’t have 100 friends. No one does.

Odds are pretty good that if you went through and deleted everyone that you don’t really talk to and/or care about, you’d be down to about 20-30 people, at the most.

That goes double for all of you half-naked blonde co-eds who have 3,000 friends; your privacy argument is out the window.

Dang near everyone on Facebook is friends with complete strangers who can see all of their favorite bands and television shows and pictures of them wasted on Jagbombs.

Anyone of those “friends” could just as easily be taking all of your oh-so-private information and selling it to the highest bidder, yet no one seems to be concerned enough to go through and wipe out their friends list.

Seriously, go through your friends and try to find someone with less than 100 friends.

On the off-chance you actually found someone who fits the bill, odds are pretty good that they’re either a Facebook newbie or someone’s mom who has yet to figure out how to find “friends.”

It is 2010, everyone has a Facebook page, a blog, a Twitter account, a million online profiles at Yahoo!/MSN/Google/etc. and who knows how many other online entities telling the world all about themselves.

We live in the vainest of times, everyone—whether they know it or not—wants to be an online star.

This is why we all spend ten minutes trying to come up with a witty status update or pose every time a digital camera pops out thinking “this is gonna be a great profile picture!”

Privacy is dead and gone.

If you really want privacy, you’re not on Facebook. You’re not reading this blog. You aren’t on the internet at all.

People who really want privacy don’t talk about how their privacy is being invaded because they’re living in the remote foothills of Kentucky or up in the mountains in Idaho.

Unless you’re ready to live in a cabin and eat raccoon—and/or move to northwest Iowa and hang out with my parents—it’s time you buck up and deal with things the way they are.

If you don’t go around posting everything you like on Facebook, then there’s nothing for the website to share with anyone, let alone those big bad advertisers who you can—you know—ignore.

You control your privacy, not Facebook.