A Quick Word on Social Media and Privacy
There has been a recent trend on Facebook of posting a legal-sounding disclaimer that is supposed to prevent Facebook from using stuff on your profile (posts, video, pictures, etc) for their own profit without your permission. On most of the posts that I've seen, it starts off with something like "Better safe than sorry..." followed by:
Due to the fact that Facebook has chosen to involve software that will allow the theft of my personal information, I state: at this date of January 4, 2015, in response to the new guidelines of Facebook, pursuant to articles L.111, 112 and 113 of the code of intellectual property, I declare that my rights are attached to all my personal data drawings, paintings, photos, video, texts etc. published on my profile and my page. For commercial use of the foregoing my written consent is required at all times.
I'm impressed to see that people I wouldn't normally expect trying to exercise some form of digital privacy, but we should all be aware that this doesn't really do anything. Snopes explains:
In any case, Facebook users cannot retroactively negate any of the privacy or copyright terms they agreed to when they signed up for their accounts, nor can they unilaterally alter or contradict any new privacy or copyright terms instituted by Facebook, simply by posting a contrary legal notice on their Facebook walls.
The Snopes article hits on an important point that most simply aren't aware of: You agreed to all of that stuff when you signed up. You are effectively giving Facebook all of those things every time you post a picture, or a poem, or whatever you put on your wall.
Though EULAs1 can be invalidated by pre-existing laws or court cases, nothing of a sort has happened like this with Facebook to date. Even had it, in your particular case you'd probably be forced to go through a costly court proceeding to get the law to side with you anyway, standing against Facebook's army of lawyers.
You still can maintain some control over your digital life on the web, however it's usually through careful management or personal policy about what and how you post. Some personal rules that I use:
Everything on the internet is public, regardless of what you expect or the site claims. Through hacking or carelessness of the developers, information you expect to stay private can and often does become public. Much of what you post on Facebook that you think is private is easily accessible by the public at large, let alone Facebook themselves. For this reason, I never post anything that I wouldn't be comfortable being read or shown to my boss, prospective employers, clergy, grandma, or whatever else. Particularly post-Snowden, it's no longer a conspiracy theory - the stuff you think is private on the internet isn't.
Anything that's "free" should be viewed cautiously.2 Free internet companies often operate by using your data to sell you targeted ads (Google, Gmail, Facebook), selling your data (Facebook), or by hoping to convert you to a paying customer (Dropbox, Google Drive, etc). In some of those cases, you may be comfortable with those terms. I use all of the aforementioned services, but I use them with the knowledge of how they make their money, and therefore what is safe[ish] to do with those services. Follow the money, make your decision based on that. If you can't easily figure out how a company or service makes it's money, you should look for something else.
Where possible, your privacy is generally better served using services you control on your own hardware. This gets past the scope of this article, but things like Owncloud, Bittorrent Sync, Firefox, arkOS, and so on. It's more work and less convenient, but privacy and personal liberty generally is.
Most of us will continue to use these services. Though I personally don't like Facebook's product, I can't get around the allure of using that thing that everyone I know uses and connects with. However, I use Facebook with a knowledge of how they make their money, and how to control my digital privacy while doing it to a level I'm comfortable with. I don't have illusions that Facebook can't scrape my feed and figure out a lot about me, or that I might run into one of my photos posted on a stock photo website. That greatly affects how I use Facebook, and it should affect how you use it, too.
Finally, if this type of thing is important to you, one of the best things you can do is follow and donate The Electronic Frontier Foundation, which I would probably call the foremost authority and advocate for privacy on the web.
End User License Agreement: that thing you agree to every time you start a new service, open your new phone, buy a new computer, break the seal for on a DVD... ↩︎
Though I use a lot of FOSS software, I still do view it with a certain amount of skepticism and prefer to stick with projects that have been tested and have a lot of community backing. It's still not fool-proof though (see: Heartbleed.). ↩︎
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