2) It doesn’t matter if you don’t leak any information about yourself if your friends do.  The most important and valuable info is your web of social contacts.  You don’t routinely reveal that to other sites, and you can’t prevent FB from getting and exploiting it.

No other major site has weakened and violated its own privacy policies so routinely.  You don’t even have to have an account with FB for them to track your web movement.

3) I agree, FB is hardly the only way for your data to leak online.  But few sites are so determined to hide that possibility from the user, provide settings to prevent it, then do it anyway.  A naive web user could easily believe from FBs comments and settings that that won’t happen, whereas actually FB actively encourages it.  If FB had the balls to say in its policy “everything you post could be known to everybody, no matter what privacy settings you pick”, I wouldn’t have a problem with it.

There are dozens of places where I can post things that will only be seen by a chosen group of friends.  If I do that on Facebook, the chance that a later privacy change will leak the photos or tags, despite that precaution, approaches certainty.  That’s fine for me; I know that.  So, apparently, do you.

Not everybody will be so lucky.  This is the kind of business decision that gets real people hurt.

As far as you comment on “name and photos” as I stated in my comment such basic info can be found easily w/o FB on the internet…so for your adopted children comment…people have been finding out past family on the net long before FB…

This leads to two questions:
1.  What is my best integrated online social networking alternative for sharing photos and news and links with a network of family and friends of all ages with varying degrees of tech competence?  Google+?  If all the alternatives are poor, I may stick with Facebook after all.
2.  I’d like to have some fun with Facebook before I leave.  I want to open some conversation threads for conversation with friends and colleagues about moving to a new social networking platform, in part hoping they move at the same time.  Also, as part of that conversation, I’d like to try out violating the terms of service and getting myself censored, just to figure out what Facebook limits really are binding.  This might help show the platform’s flaws and convince my friends to move.  Can anybody suggest violations to try?

One of my biggest complaints is that it’s a huge time/effort investment to keep up with friends. I realized when I attempted to start keeping up again after most of a year ignoring it, that I’d need to devote well over an hour a day just to remain current. But then I discovered Flipboard, which makes it a lot less terrible. Using that tool I’m able to skim through the crap in a couple minutes each morning.

In the past couple months I’ve made it a point to email friends I haven’t spoken to in a while. That seems to get me significantly better “results” than a status update or a wall post.

Why would I want virtual friendships instead of real ones?

But with Facebook you don’t have to waste precious time calling or e-mailing your friends. With updates, friends can be batch processed!

For example, by default Facebook apps used by your friends have had permission to vacuum up your personal information, so it doesn’t make the slightest difference whether you join all the stupid widgets – you just have to know one person who would.

Likewise, there are a lot of people for whom “name and photo” is plenty enough to cause serious trouble.  Adopted children, for example.

People make a big deal out of FB and privacy because no other company simultaneously provides such a useful service and such a deliberately compromised and dangerous one.

I joined up a few years back, just cause everybody else was on it, and it seemed like the place to go to dig up folks out of your past. Without doubt, given its user base, that’s its killer app. But that’s all I’ll use it for.

1. Use you real name and a photo that people know is you. 
2. Lie on almost every other piece of information in a humorous way that doesn’t confuse your friends…to much.
3. Don’t join all the stupid widgets, games, functionality…ect. 

Big freaking deal…the world has you name and photo…I”m quite sure we can dig up more then that on you from the intertubes.

Get over your self importance everyone…or quiet filling out every freaking field on the forms. Lastly…this is for the stupid guy I know that owns his own business, don’t tell the world when you are going on vacation, where you live (yes his address is specific on his profile) and what you own in said house…

Actually, without FB I’d have no idea what’s going on with all my friends on the other side of the world (literally).  I think it’s great that we get to stay in relatively close contact.

Seriously. It’s malware. Avoid at all costs.

I must be doing Facebook wrong. I don’t really get the burden at all.

http://www.facebook.com/help/?faq=224562897555674