Every single piece of advice and even official "best practice" is to minimize the amount of personal information you divulge on the internet.

ISTM that this is diametrically opposed to the whole purpose of Farcebook, which is to dump your entire lack of a life onto a blog, then share it with your equally sad "friends".

FWIW, I personally think of Farcebook as a "social networking site" in the same sense that I think of syphilis as a "social disease".

You (ie, the Inq) keep complaining about so-called "privacy violations" by Farcebook. But if people use sites like this, and sign up to their utterly one-sided T&Cs, then quite frankly they deserve all they get.

I avoided it like the plaque for privacy reasons.

I doubt this will happen, but if Facebook doesn't clean up their act on privacy before the end of 2011, they might as well shut down.

This article said:

QUOTE "Advertisers can also request that we display ads based on the things you have said you liked in your profile." How do the advertisers know what you have "liked"?"

Although I completely hate Facebook's play on our privacy, the above could have been that advertisers can dig into your personal data, but what she/they meant was: Advertisers can request the option that uses an algorithm to show their ads according to people's "Likes", a bit like how adsense works.

So no, she didn't admit that advertisers had their hands on the data, only that they have the option to "use" that data via their (Facebook's) advertisement algorithm.

re: "Our system chooses which ads to show you, we don't need to share any of your personal information with advertisers in order to show you relevant ads." Then a little later Sandberg goes onto admit, "Advertisers can also request that we display ads based on the things you have said you liked in your profile." How do the advertisers know what you have "liked"?

This sounds like plain keyword-based advertising. Exactly the same way advertisers can buy ads to be placed on Google when you search for 'facebook', they'd be able to place ads for users who've chosen to Like 'facebook'.

That said, I still trust facebook about as far as I can throw them.