December 7, 2009

Hi Sherro,

Thought the privacy rules and regulations direct from the Facebook site might be relevant here. The people who are under the false impression it\'s a private forum need to really address what they want out of it.

"3. Information You Share With Third Parties

We take steps to ensure that others use information that you share on Facebook in a manner consistent with your privacy settings, but we cannot guarantee that they will follow our rules. Read the following section to learn more about how you can protect yourself when you share information with third parties.

Sharing information on Facebook. We designed our privacy settings to enable you to control how you share your information on Facebook. You should review the default privacy settings to make sure they reflect your preferences. Here are some specific things to remember:

@ You can control the visibility of most of the information you share on Facebook through the privacy settings you select.

@ Certain categories of information such as your name, profile photo, list of friends and pages you are a fan of, gender, and networks you belong to are considered publicly available, and therefore do not have privacy settings. (We will soon stop using regional networks, but your geographic region will still be considered publicly available). You can limit the ability of others to find this information on third party search engines through your search privacy settings.

@ Some of the content you share and the actions you take will show up on your friends' home pages and other pages they visit.

@ Even after you remove information from your profile or delete your account, copies of that information may remain viewable elsewhere to the extent it has been shared with others, it was otherwise distributed pursuant to your privacy settings, or it was copied or stored by other users.

@ You understand that information might be re-shared or copied by other users.

@ Certain types of communications that you send to other users cannot be removed, such as messages."

As you can see with the 2nd last point, information can be used and re-shared. If said user does not want things to be seen by others, they either need to - not say it, or make sure your friends are just that and not a status symbol...

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