Facebook. . .Privacy . . .No

Due to Mr White's Last post on the lack of privacy that has been discovered on Facebook, i decided to aim my research this week in the direction of privacy settings because we all know that when we press 'i do accept these terms and conditions' no one actualy reads the 10 page essay before it. Here is a post about the current affair on facebook and its privacy by Rory Cellan-Jones.

Facebook and privacy
Rory Cellan-Jones
1 May 08, 17:28 GMT
How worried are you about the amount of private and personal stuff you have posted on social networking sites? I've always been pretty relaxed - both because I'm very careful about how much information I give away, and because I think I know my way around privacy settings.
But an investigation by my colleagues at Click has made me think again. They set out to explore just how much data is accessible to developers who make applications for Facebook. What they found was that it was relatively simple to write an application which would give the developer access to lots of personal data - not just from those who've installed that application, but also from their list of Facebook friends.
The problem is a by-product of Facebook's decision a year ago to throw open its doors to outside developers. It was a move hailed as a master-stroke at the time, making Facebook a platform for all kinds of innovative new ideas which would benefit developers and the users, and give the social network an edge in its battle with MySpace.
A year on it's not looking so smart. For one thing, a ceaseless flow of new applications of varying quality has cluttered up Facebook. For another, the access to user data given to developers has only served to heighten controversy about privacy, the issue that has become an ever bigger worry for all users of social networks.
By contrast, MySpace was rather slower off the mark in opening up its platform But it exercises far greater control than Facebook over the applications that developers are now producing. For one thing, they all run off MySpace servers, for another the code of every application is inspected before it is allowed onto the site.
Now Facebook points out that users can adjust their privacy settings to limit the access to their data that is given to any application. But how many of us knew that - or do anything about it? I know I haven't.
For Web 2.0 businesses two principles seem to have become gospel over the last year - openness and collaboration with external software developers, and respect for the privacy of your users' data. The trouble is, as Facebook has discovered, they can be mutually incompatible.