The chatter has increased these days with lots of techies and bloggers deciding to sign off facebook in order to protect their privacy. So what happened that changed things suddenly? Why is privacy so important now?
Last month facebook changed their privacy policy yet again. And now they get to share all your information with their partner sites. All one needs is a little HTML code from facebook and I have all your information. Now what could one do with this information?

Remember the Truman Show? That's how your life has become. Everyone in the world can see what you do each day. You live a life for everyone in the world to see, everything you do, every move you make. Every bit of your happiness and sadness is now played out to the world. The information can be easily used to stalk you and build up a huge profiling database. Your every move can be predicted and you end up being directed by your fans and friends. Imagine a life lead for the public decided by the public; that's what happens when you do not have privacy and when you choose to use Facebook's default privacy settings. And that's the reason most of us techies want to get out of facebook. We prefer leading lives and sharing updates with a small group of friends we know and not with their friends of friends or the world.

How can you reclaim your privacy and prevent facebook from making your life a Truman Show...

The most straight forward technique is to just go to facebooks settings dialog box and retrieving every setting to friends only instead of everyone. And then opting out of sites and everything else. There are a total of over 100 options before you can get your privacy back which is harder than deactivating the facebook account and leading a phone based social life.

The second alternative is to make use of automated privacy scanners such as reclaim privacy. These are just javascripts that are run inside a facebook page. The javascripts will look at all the myriad of privacy settings and will tell you where your privacy stands and will also offer to correct it..Try


http://www.reclaimprivacy.org/

there are a couple more which you can find by a simple google search; the best thing about these scanners are that they are open source and if they steal data the web will be awash with those stories.

Unless you wish to lead your life in the public's eye and wish to entertain everyone; change your privacy settings to private and lead your life, your way :) You might also want to delete unknown people from your friends lists as they might be there for gathering data to be used for spamming you later....