Now that privacy is almost non-existent for Facebook users, even if you undo the default share everything settings, there are all kinds of potential leaks that could lead to identity theft, fraudulent activity, and, perish the thought, someone become a friend of someone you vaguely know because you retweeted them once.

Seriously though, I am not being paranoid, simply playing safe to alert people to the fact that unmarried names, your wherabout, birthplaces, birthdays, activities, hobbies, place of work etc etc could all be exploited by non-friends of your non-friends on the social networking site, especially now that it has opened up connectivity with other sites and potentially even more. Even if you disable “Instant Personalization” (essentially Facebook Beacon resurrected) your friends will still be able to share certain aspects of your Facebook activity on certain other websites even when you don’t want them to.

As such, I am no longer the Facebook slut I once was and have started repealing friendships with Facebook users I don’t actually know. I still have a lot of loose connections and am happy to friend people whom I loosely trust, but if you no longer see my status updates, it’s not that I don’t like you any more, it’s just that I probably never knew you in the first place.

If you want to stay connected, please “like” the sciencebase fan page instead.

Not being paranoid, just playing safe.

This item about why you should delete your Facebook account appeared the day after I wrote the initial draft for this blog post.

A scientific preprint also discusses an important aspect of using online social tools – “Using social networks to make recommendations will always compromise privacy, according to a mathematical proof of the limits of privacy.” More on that here.