Many Internet marketers and sellers of information products are on Facebook, including me.
Facebook allows you to use a Fan page to explicitly promote your business (a step I’ll be taking very soon), and it also allows you to have a personal account where explicit posts promoting sales are forbidden.
Many Internet marketers do mix business on their personal account and accept large numbers of people they don’t know, but think could be potential customers or joint-venture partners. Others just want their personal accounts for friends and family.
Facebook Privacy Controversy
Facebook made changes in April that makes it much easier for the company to share information about you on the Internet, including what you write and photos you’re in. You can make changes to your privacy settings, but Facebook leaves the default settings at low privacy and relies on you to make them more strict.
(Why is Facebook doing this? So they can be an even larger player on the Internet and sell more advertising.)
We’ll look at two sides of the controversy: one blogger deletes his Facebook account, while another blogger revels in the increased publicity.
Internet Law Attorney Mike Young Has Deleted His Facebook Account
Mike Young of Internet Law Resources recently pulled the plug on Facebook because of privacy issues:
In particular, Facebook has taken a very “everything’s public” stance on your account content, including your photos, sexual orientation, relationship status, posts regarding your business and personal life. Even when you block applications from seeing your personal data, it is unclear and unlikely that apps harvesting data from Facebook friends who use them will respect your privacy.
Read Mike’s entire post to get a detailed criticism of Facebook privacy policies.
Robert Scoble Wants Facebook to Be Even Less Private
Robert Scoble of the high-traffic Scoblizer blog wants no privacy at all:
The thing I hate about Facebook is that people who want to see my profile can’t. Even now only 5,000 of you can look at my Facebook profile. That’s lame.
I want to live my life in public. Why? Because that way none of you can exploit me more than any other.
Peruse all of Robert’s post to understand his view.
My Take
#1. IMPORTANT: I never write anything on a blog, on Facebook, on Twitter, anywhere on the Internet, that I wouldn’t want on the front page of my hometown newspaper. That doesn’t mean I don’t show personality or express strong opinions. I do. It means I only rarely criticize other people, say negative things, or use foul language, and only then with just cause.
#2. I keep my personal Facebook page primarily for friends and family, although I am friends with select business contacts. (I focus on business on my Twitter account.)
#3. I allow some of my Facebook information to be public. I think it’s a good way for people to know me, to trust me, and to decide if they want to do business with me.
What’s your take on Facebook’s privacy policy? How do you handle your privacy on Facebook, and on the Internet as a whole?
{ 19 comments… read them below or add one }
Great post, John! I originally joined FB to reconnect with my NY high school and college friends. I moved to CA over 20 years ago and sometimes miss the NY buzz and FB has been great with keeping me in touch. I’m a pretty private person and want more control over my personal information on the internet. I do have a business and plan to create a FB fan page to get the word out more. It’s smart to keep business and personal info separate.
I agree, only post things you would be comfortable to have your local newspaper print or what you would want your momma to read.
Stephanie, I think you have a good handle on the situation. And fan pages are the way to go for businesses.
Have you checked your Facebook privacy settings to be sure you’re only making public what you want public?
Great post!
I personally keep deleting my facebook account. But get this – even when you DELETE it, it’s not gone. Shortly after I thought I had deleted it someone sent me a link to look at their page or something, so I clicked and out of curiosity tried to log back in to my account. It was all there still, my pictures, comments, friends, etc.
Pretty bad that they don’t even get rid of your info when you decide to leave the site!
Overall I’m not a big facebook fan – like Betty White said this weekend – seems like a big waste of time.
Angela Wills´s last blog ..Why Not Outsource Your Website Design?
Angela, I read that Facebook keeps your information for a set amount of time after you “delete” everything just in case you change your mind.
It is annoying. You said delete, yet they didn’t.
Are you sure you didn’t deactivate your account? Deletion is hidden in a tertiary link. If you delete your account, it takes 14 days to happen. If you deactivate your account, it never goes away.
Ari Herzog´s last blog ..4 Key Strategies for Multilingual Blogging
I like Facebook and am primarily using it to keep track of what my friends are up to and to let people know about my thoughts, gigs, albums, blog posts, etc…As such, I don’t really care who has access to this stuff. The more the better. If I didn’t want the world to know what I’m up to, I wouldn’t even be on line. Not only do I consider anything I post on my blog, Facebook, myspace, whatever, to be readable by anyone, hometown paper included, I apply the same consideration to emails, my buying history on eBay, all that stuff.
Everything I say, I’m prepared to defend, own up to, and/or make public. I have a pretty open door policy here. I do say negative things about people, but they are things I’m prepared to say to their face. I may not WANT to say it to their face, I may PREFER to keep it private, but I am prepared to say it to their face. I find it easier to just say “Fuck it–It’s all public”, than to screen and pick and choose which level of privacy to apply to which post, which site, etc.
But then I’m not trying to maintain a specific image. I’m a Taoist and that is reflected in my T’ai-Chi teaching, my music and the rest of my life. To me Taoism is about being myself, being natural and constantly seeking balance. It is not about being good, holy or on some moral high ground. So, for instance, I have a picture of a porn star in one of my blog posts about tattoos. I use explicit language in my songs. I post all kinds of strong opinions personally and musically. My whole attitude is: This is who I am. Take it or leave it. I’m not trying to sculpt an image that is tailored to a specific audience.
That said, there are two things I do to prevent trouble and strife regarding privacy on the net though. One is that I’m careful about certain types of jokes and statements where the tone of the thing could be misinterpreted. The internet is very poor at conveying tone. Or should I say that any text only mode of communication puts extra pressure on the communicator to be careful to convey tone correctly. So where a joke or post could be misinterpreted I put extra care in how I say it, so it is not misinterpreted. And the other thing I do to have a separate bank account that I use for internet transactions. It is backed up by Visa and acts like a credit card. *Important*: This account does not have overdraft protection. This way if anyone steals the account info all they can do is steal what’s in this account and there’s never more than a few hundred dollars in it. If I make a bigger on line purchase, I transfer the funds to this account first. I highly recommend this last step as identity theft can be a huge pain in the ass if it happens to you.
Good post John!
Gene, I agree with you about the importance of being yourself, and especially about only saying negative things about someone that you’d be willing to say to his face. (For that applies to in-person conversation also.)
And I didn’t touch on e-mail, but anyone who wants to can post an e-mail you sent on the Internet, so I’m also careful there.
Jokes and talking about race, gender, sexual orientation and the like can definitely be misinterpreted in print, so I’m always careful to be sure I’m as clear as possible when writing about such subjects.
Gene,
I wish more people thought as you do. All this hullabalu wouldn’t be going on.
The Taoist philosophy is wonderful to live by living mindfully, in the present, and taking responsibility for/loving who you are. Wow wouldn’t that be a wonderful world. Ah, wishful thinking.
Bless~ed Be! & Regards,
Elizabeth Jo
Hey John,
I think it’s one of those things; either this decreased privacy will work for you or it won’t. I have no problem with the world knowing who I am. I don’t put anything on FB that I wouldn’t want literally anyone knowing.
Wynne´s last blog ..Automatically Generate Relevant Internal Links to Give Yourself Better Rankings With This Wordpress Plugin
Wynne, I think you and I have a similar outlook about Facebook.
I do occasionally make snarky comments that are really intended only for people who know me, so perhaps I should be a bit more careful.
A key point for everyone: Always give a second reading to anything you put on the Internet. Not only will you catch typos and grammar errors, but you’ll also sometimes realize you don’t really want to say that at all, or that it can be said in a clearer or more diplomatic way.
John,
This is a very good point…
I’m not always very good at re-reading what I write, but I’m willing to stand by what I say. When typing I don’t tend to let fly without thinking. But, if I’m called on something I need to apologize for I will.
I should be more careful about re-reading for tone & typos though. I see a lot of these while reading others’ articles/blogs. Maybe we should also be a little more involved with each other & let the person know if we find a typo or tone problem.
Regards,
Elizabeth Jo
This is REAL important. Leo Laporte is now advocating deleting Facbook profiles because of a blog post by Jason Calacanis.
I added all the links you need on my profile on Google rather than on my blogs so I could share them. You all need to read what these top influencers are saying about Facebook.
http://www.google.com/profiles/chrislang
I am interested to see what you all think here after you read what Leo Laporte has linked to and had to say….
I read a bit about this, and there are many high-profile Internet people who are leaving Facebook over the privacy issue, and they’re calling for an alternative to Facebook that is not under Facebook’s control.
Matt Cutts is one, Leo Laporte is huge though, he is followed by many average computer users going back to the Call For Help show on Tech TV with Kevin Rose, a close Zuckerburg friend.
The question that remians John, is will major corporations like CNN that popularized Facebook continue to use this? Will they care? The things Calacanis said about Zuckerburg are pretty vile though.
Chris, I’m still learning about this whole Facebook privacy issue. I just saw a post on ReadWriteweb.com about it, and I’ll continue to follow up and educate myself.
And I’ll definitely consider leaving Facebook — and joining a better alternative.
Thanks for bringing this to our attention!
John, I don’t advocate deleting Facebook accounts, but I am wondering if there is going to be a down turn of the quality of Facebook members due to the sudden negativity. Privacy is no issue to me, as I, like Scoble would just as-soon Facebook took down the walled garden approach.
The irony of this entire situation is if someone is not reading blogs, is not tweeting, is not active online and reads or is shared tech articles, then one has no clue what’s going on.
And, this is not about privacy. This is about Facebook implementing opt-out behavior, not opt-in. This is also about Facebook requiring real names, not handles. This is about many things that go against the global userbase of Facebook, of which privacy is a part.
Ari Herzog @ Online Media Strategies´s last blog ..Former Facebook User Explains Why He Quit
Ari, most of the people I know who are on Facebook know little or nothing about Facebook’s privacy policies and what it truly means for their own privacy on the Internet.
However, I have seen several people post about the privacy rules, so there is some concern among at least some of my Facebook friends.