Wow. What a whirlwind of news there has been lately on this topic. Sometime this week, I came across danah boyd‘s thoughts (read: rant) on the war that is perceived to be going on between Facebook and its users surrounding privacy. Her thoughts can be found on her blog here.

While I’ll admit that I enjoyed the entire post, I think she brings up the most valuable thought towards the end:

The key to addressing this problem is not to say “public or private?” but to ask how we can make certain people are 1) informed; 2) have the right to chose; and 3) are consenting without being deceived. I’d be a whole lot less pissed off if people had to opt-in in December. Or if they could’ve retained the right to keep their friends lists, affiliations, interests, likes, and other content as private as they had when they first opted into Facebook.

I have had discussions with lots of friends lately about how we think that Facebook and social networking sites like it have forced people to be a bit more “real” with the world, and that while the internet used to be a place where digital inhabitants created separate selves and interacted, those types of interactions are less prevalent. Currently, we see many users creating social media accounts to be themselves… online. Danah’s point here is invaluable in that discussion because while we are choosing to use services like Facebook, switching settings on users without any notice (other then Mashable/TechCrunch and others blogging about it and having it spread virally throughout the Internet) is pretty wrong. I’m all for people being themselves online, but I’d just like to know who is able to see me be me…

As was pointed out in the article, if you have a Facebook account and have no idea what I am talking about, jump over to TechCrunch, The New York Times or Google and search “facebook privacy” then begin reading. You might (should) be surprised.