Over the past two years (its gotten really bad in the past 6 months) Facebook has steadily altered the default privacy settings to allow more and more of your personal data to be available to more and more people.
Currently, if you have never changed your privacy settings, the vast majority of the information you put on Facebook is fully viewable to the *ENTIRE* Internet*.
This is absolutely abhorrent to me!
What is the solution? Nobody has the definitive answer, there is one that has real promise to me though:
The Diaspora Project
Four college students are working on their solution. Daniel Grippi, Maxwell Salzberg, Raphael Sofaer, Ilya Zhitomirskiy are creating "the privacy aware, personally controlled, do-it-all, distributed, free, social network." And that has me really excited.
It is waaayyyy too soon to know if Diaspora is going to go anywhere. Recently, they asked for a total of $10,000 in donations so they could afford to forgo summer jobs and get a jump coding Diaspora instead. They are now at over double their ten grand goal.... and that is a big sign. Facebook needs competition, badly. The ideals the four fellows stand for are honourable: distributed, secure, user-controllable, open source. I have high hopes. I can\'t wait until something of Diaspora exists, other then the current ethereal, lofty ideas.
Check out the project:
http://www.joindiaspora.com/
http://twitter.com/joindiaspora
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/196017994/diaspora-the-personally-co...
Facebook links to make you hurl:
* - http://mattmckeon.com/facebook-privacy/
http://www.allfacebook.com/2009/12/facebook-privacy-new/
http://www.fastcompany.com/1624745/time-to-audit-your-facebook-privacy-s...
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