FaceBook and Privacy

There’s a lot to like about social network services and sites, at least when they let you choose what you want to share, and who you want to share it with. FaceBook has been steadily degrading their Privacy policies to allow them to re-use posted content (for free, naturally) pretty much how ever FaceBook wants. They’ve consistently messed with their UI to make it difficult to understand or to change your privacy settings. And they’re grabbing user content and re-posting to Community pages that FaceBook controls (presumably for the purposes of ad targeting).

There’s bookmarklet on the page linked  below (drag the bookmarklet to your Web browser toolbar then log in to Facebook) that checks to see what kind of information FaceBook can/is sharing about you, and helps you tweak your FaceBook privacy settings, if you want.

This site has a bookmarklet that lets you check your Privacy settings, an otherwise arcane is complex process with a UI that often requires you to click five items before arriving at a setting to change.

The bookmarklet is a simple javascript; it is harmless, and you can safely use and delete it.