Facebook Privacy Issue

Privacy is a hot issue nowadays, everyone is yelling about Facebook privacy policy and even new projects are starting to raise tens of thousands of US$ on the pledge to develop a more privacy-compliant service.
The most criticism towards Facebook privacy is the frequent updates the social network is bringing to its privacy policy. People are losing faith and trust and many are closing their accounts.To have an idea of how much people are really looking to close their accounts, you can just go to Google trends and enter the following phrase ‘delete facebook account’. What I got is the following chart.

Notice the peak in the curve after the first quarter of 2010.
So what’s wrong in that privacy policy? If you have time you can go to Facebook Privacy Policy and read over 200 lines of policy rules or you can just read a summary of it below.

In short Facebook privacy policy says the following:

• Children below age 13 are not accepted and any information about children below that age are not stored.
  
  
• Facebook will not store your password you provide to Facebook in order to import your contact list from you email account such as Hotmail, Gmail, Yahoo Mail…
  
  
• Facebook will log your activities on its website, which means whatever action you do on your profile will be logged. Actually every site does that. Once I called Microsoft Business Parnter support and the guy told me what I did three years ago!
  
  
• Facebook might (in my opinion this means WILL) share information with advertisers about your behavior on THEIR website! So if you click on an ad on Facebook and you went to the advertiser site and navigated N number of pages or selected this item or that item, Facebook is likely to know! However Facebook says that after 180 days (6months) this information will be ‘anonymized’ which means it won’t be associated to your account any more.
  
  
• Now the biggest issue is in third party applications:
  
  
• Facebook does not guarantee that any third party application will comply with its privacy policy.
  
  
• If a friend of yours added a third party application and gave it enough permissions, this application will be able to access any data on your profile that your friend can access by himself. So you are at the mercy of your friend wise judgment.

After reading this, if you feel you are insecure and you want to close your account. Facebook has given you a way to do that, just follow this link delete account.
Another alternative is to avoid putting online any sensitive data. This is a general rule and not only related to Facebook.