Privacy and FB

Is there a private life in our online communities?

if there is, how private would it be?

I was lingering on Facebook (oh yes AGAIN) and i was wondering should i change my privacy settings. but as i was looking through it, i found it quite tricky. It gave me the option of disclose certain informations about myself to either my friends, everyone, friends of friends and even the 'other' option that allows you to customize your privacy setting. If we look at it closely and think about it, all these options doesn't really help in maintaining your privacy. One of the most amazing?stupid?tricky? part of Facebook is the friend request option. I was looking at it the other day and found out that Facebook have automatically requested some strangers to be my friend without my authorization. If i didn't found out about this the other day, that stranger might have been my 'friends' and all my informations will be disclose to a total stranger.

To be honest, i do not believe that there is this sense of privacy on any online social networks. For me, the whole point of joining a social network is to disclose some of my informations, and sharing it with my friends and family. With this in mind, i would not be constantly thinking of whether my information will leak out to somewhere else or not, because if it ever happens, i am kind of expected it to be.

Whatever we choose to post on our profile in a social network site, it does not only limited to our friends and family. These information can be easily track down by some other people. One of the current trend that i am seeing on Facebook is the commercial aspect of it, and how it manipulate the informations network in Facebook. Some people actually created a profile and start selling their products. Well that sounds perfectly fine, but the thing is, they tagged people in their pictures so that other people around the people who got tagged will get notified. From this we can see the chain effect of Facebook, on how informations are disclosed and pass down. These people who are trying to sell something on Facebook also tend to hack into other people's account and start changing their profile pictures into their products' images without the users' consent.

By choosing to put our information online, and displaying them to the world, at that stage, we already choose to chuck part of our privacy away. Of course we can control and filter what sort of informations we want the others to know, but we cannot exactly expect that all our informations will be kept with us safe and sound.

I reckon, the only way to protect our privacy is to either not disclosing our informations online at all, or filter the ones you do not wish to publish and kept them somewhere real safe (which sadly, there isn't such thing yet online).