It’s come to light that someone has posted a big dataset of Facebook information – so big it’s over 100,000,000 users.  MSNBC has a story on it here but it’s being widely reported.  A little “inside baseball” shows this is not unique:

1.  A bunch of companies have been doing this for a while now (they’re well ahead of the open source ‘hacker’ crowd).

2.  As some of the articles suggest, changing privacy settings really doesn’t work well retroactively.

Once you put information out on the Web, it’s hard to “erase it” although we have some options if you have accounts or items of data that you want to try and get deleted from the Web.   The best way to protect yourself is not to stop being social or trying to find the most trusted ‘least hackable” sites.

Instead of blindly trusting everything we do to be OK and to be kept reasonably private, we should try to separate the key personal information that links us as unique individuals that are easy to find as people to our usage of sites and services.  That way, you can still use the Web the way you want and have the privacy you expect and deserve.  From your email address to your phone number to your passwords and the trails of history you leave after visiting sites, Abine has lots of ways to help make this easy.   If you haven’t given the Privacy Suite a try yet, you can download it free here.

Are you one of these Facebook users?

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