Facebook: privacy

Facebook was in the news for privacy issues last year and again just recently.

In November [2007], Facebook introduced an advertising program called Beacon that tracked its users’ activities on other Web sites and sent reports to their friends. Users complained that it was intrusive, leading Facebook to scale back the program.

And, last week's imbroglio:

Magnus Wallin, the founder of a Facebook group called “How to permanently delete your Facebook account,” posted a warning on Friday.

“Users who have requested to be deleted via the recently introduced form are only partly deleted, even though the deletion is confirmed by Facebook staff,” Mr. Wallin wrote.

On Saturday, after the partially deleted profiles disappeared, Mr. Wallin said in an e-mail message, “Now there seems to be a way to completely remove yourself from Facebook, without having to delete items individually.” But he does not plan to retire from his group.

“It’s pretty obvious that Facebook are scared of losing loads of members if they made the delete option easily available,” Mr. Wallin said.

Approaching my half-full/half-empty life year, I'm not in a demographic that extensively participates in Web 2.0. And, as a much-younger 20-something friend said to me—surprising me: "Why should I let everyone, everywhere, know my personal business, forever?"

In other words, you don't have to sign up. But, that being said, Facebook and others of its ilk can serve as useful networking tools.

On Feb. 8, a British newspaper, The Sun, reported that Bill Gates, the chairman of Microsoft, had deleted his Facebook account ­ not out of privacy concerns, but because he got “more than 8,000 friend requests a day and spotted weird fan sites about him.”

Bill never listed me as a friend.

More from The New York Times, 18 February:
After Stumbling, Facebook Finds a Working Eraser.