Facebook has announced its long awaited IPO, and I have given my opinion previously on its value – or lack thereof in my opinion – but I thought I would focus more on the privacy issues in this blog.

There is a real danger in the way Facebook operates, that people expose themselves to having all of their information readily seen by strangers or perhaps people that do not mean them any good. Most people are not very good at attending to the various privacy settings and Facebook makes it a lot harder by continually changing the look of the site, the layout and where everything is and so it needs quite a bit of time to actually get the settings right and if, for example, your setting is “Friends of friends” it means that anybody that you met, just once in a bar and agreed to add on Facebook, and all of their friends who you simply do not know to see all of your information. There is no much that can be gleaned from photographs, let alone the written information and very quickly a profile is built up of where you shop, where you typically go on the weekend, where you work and I don’t believe it is healthy that people are able to research you in depth.
It is even stranger when a company’s business model is basically to sell your private information to other companies and tell them that, for example, you are interested in movies, so they advertise movies to you on your profile and that of course is an innocuous example. I am quite sure at some stage there will be a backlash against a company making money out of your own private information and likes and dislikes.