Ben Parr Quotes

Facebook's privacy policies are confusing to many people, and the company has changed them frequently, almost always allowing more information to be exposed in more ways.

Facebook is by far the largest of these social networking sites, and starting with its ill-fated Beacon service, privacy concerns have more than once been raised about how the ubiquitous social networking site handles its user data.

When I think about privacy on social media sites, there's kind of the usual suspect problems, which doesn't make them any less important or severe; it's just we kind of know their shape, and we kind of know how we're going to solve them.

If Facebook gets your entire social graph, you don't necessarily want to share everything with your entire social graph. You might wanna parse that social graph. So there's a company called PASS that is a private social network that I personally use for my friends and my family.

You might not like that Facebook shares your political opinions with Politico, but are you really going to delete all the photos, all the posts, all the connections - the presence you've spent years establishing on the world's dominant social network?

Just mention the idea of warrantless wiretaps and expect to get hit up with a congressional investigation. But give somebody an avatar and a URL, and he can't tweet, post or hyperlink enough personal information about himself to as many people as possible.

I'm not on Facebook. I have a sort of anonymous account that I check, like, once every six months every time Facebook rolls out a new feature.

We willingly share personal information with companies for the convenience of using their products.

I don't know how much thought is behind it, but it seems to me highly effective the way that Facebook will let somebody tag a photo with a friend's name, then others who are a friend of that friend can perhaps immediately see the photo, and the friend, in the meantime, has a chance to wander back and un-tag it.

Facebook is not your friend, it is a surveillance engine.

The real question for me is, do people have the tools that they need in order to make those decisions well? And I think that it's actually really important that Facebook continually makes it easier and easier to make those decisions... If people feel like they don't have control over how they're sharing things, then we're failing them.

The nice thing about Reddit is, we don't have to sell your data or build a profile of you or do stuff that makes people feel uncomfortable.

We don't want privacy so much as privacy settings.

For a while, I couldn't join Facebook because of my last name. During the registration process, I was asked for my real name, and when I wrote 'Fake,' it rejected me. Finally, a friend working for Facebook took care of me.

In a perfect world, we would have put users in control of their information when the Internet was first created.

When we talk with policymakers about Facebook, it's about how users have control over information.

Do we value privacy in any real way? Thinking about blogs, Twitter, Facebook, MySpace... all these suggest we value exposure rather more. And instead of challenging this transformation, as they are supposed to - certainly at the more thoughtful edges of the art - novelists are buying into it wholesale.

Facebook and Google are battling over who will be our gateway to the rest of the Internet through 'like' buttons and universal logins - giving them huge power over our online identities and activities.

On social networking sites, we may expose ourselves, but we choose to do so. We are in control and, often wrongly, we do not feel we are giving away tradable data.

I talk to my fan club members, and I blog, and they know what's going on. But as far as Twitter, I'll be in a restaurant, and I'll get home, and somebody tweeted, and they talked about what I ordered and what I was wearing. In some cases, that could be dangerous, because you don't want everybody to know where you are every second of every day.

It simply isn't acceptable for the likes of Google, Facebook, Amazon and others, which amass data by the terabyte, to say, 'Don't worry, your information's safe with us, as all sorts of rules protect you' - when all evidence suggests otherwise.

You happily give Facebook terabytes of structured data about yourself, content with the implicit tradeoff that Facebook is going to give you a social service that makes your life better.

Facebook says, 'Privacy is theft,' because they're selling your lack of privacy to the advertisers who might show up one day.

I am not a fan of Facebook or Twitter. They both allow too much information to be available and they make privacy a thing of the past.

Does Facebook act as though I own my online life, or as though it does? Concretely: Can I control what data it shares with other users, with advertisers, and with business partners?