Many of the Guild’s regular readers are also Facebook users.  At last count, 114 of you have “friended”/”liked” the Guild on Facebook.  And for those of our readers without Facebook accounts, I’m certain that you have at least some familiarity with premise of the site.  Essentially, Facebook is a way to locate, connect, and share information with your “friends”.  These “friends” may be real-life friends, colleagues, classmates, students, or random people you’ve met online.  I’ll be one of the first to admit that Facebook has been very valuable to me, because it has allowed me to reconnect with a huge number of classmates from grade school and high school that I may otherwise have completely lost contact with.

Recently, Facebook has come under fire for (more) changes the service has made to its privacy policies and default privacy settings.  The New York Times recently posted a great article that visually shows how Facebook’s privacy policy has grown since 2005.  The short version is that Facebook’s privacy policy has grown from 1004 words (2005) to 5830 words (2010) which is 1300 words more than the U.S. Constitution (without amendments) to put things in perspective.  Flickr’s policy: a mere 384 words.

What I find more troubling, though, are the changes to Facebook’s default privacy settings.  Take a look at matt McKeon’s graphical representation of “The Evolution of Privacy on Facebook“.  Yikes!  The recent default settings expose nearly all of the content you place on Facebook to the entire Internet.

Even worse, Facebook has launched a new “Instant Personalization” pilot program which has default security settings that share information about Facebook users with third-party websites.  This information about your activities on those sites can then be shared with your “friends” who also visit those sites.

With the vast array of privacy settings on Facebook (and the difficulty in accessing some of them) it may be handy to have a tool to check the current status of your settings.  I recently started using “ReclaimPrivacy” to periodically confirm that my privacy settings are locked-down.  Another tool (also free), that I haven’t used, is SaveFace, which sets all of your privacy settings to “Friends Only”.

While some users are making plans to leave Facebook, I’ve decided to stay a while longer, but keep a much closer eye on the changes being made.  The availability of tools like the ones I’ve linked to in this post have made me feel more comfortable with that decision.