I recently quit using Facebook because I had the feeling that I was being watched all the time, which is a scary feeling. I can understand if you are rich and famous that people would want to see what you are doing. As fun as it is to be popular and social, it does have its downsides. When one displays personal information on the site it can be a serious danger because then almost anyone can see your information. Who likes to be stalked, anyway? For the people in one's circle of friends, you are likely to see the good, bad and the ugly of what your friends post. With the more ways to communicate that Facebook offers, people have more and more access to you, this even includes people in the company you might work in. Businesses that could use the publicity, Facebook is a great tool for promoting a business but for personal reasons it is a risky piece of software to use.
The whole problem of displaying personal information came up for me a few years ago when I was in the end of my college years and applications were just starting to get introduced to Facebook. According to some other informational reads that I have read over the years, something as little as a birth year can allow hackers to get all sorts of sensitive information about you. It is even worse to put your address or hometown on your profile because it is information that again hackers can use to get your personal information or even endanger your life. On top of that, telling everyone on Facebook what you are doing can endanger your life even more because everyone including the bad people will know where you are and what you are doing. No one wants to get stalked.
The other big issue that led me to leave Facebook is how people can post about their lives in their statuses. Like the paragraph above, telling the world what you are doing or worse telling the world something stupid can get you into trouble with creeps or even businesses that can help you pay the bills. There are websites that are out there that allow one to search a name of someone and get every instance that the name appears on the web, including all social networking sites. These tools are handy for HR departments of companies to not only see if you have a social networking page but to also learn a little about you via the pictures and dialogs that get recorded on the site. People have gotten fired from posting the wrong type of information on Facebook.
Within the last few paragraphs, I touched on the fact that Facebook gives people more access to you personally. There was an article in the news about Facebook's owner, Mark Zuckerburg, getting stalked on his own creation. Right before I quit, I felt very much like people had way too much access to me. Every time someone took a picture of me and tagged me, the pictures would show up in my personal feed and the universal feed for all of my friends to see. I have seen people that I know that have pictures pop up on their Facebook (and the feed) of them that I am pretty sure they don't want posted for the world to see. Once anything is posted it can surely be deleted but there might be a small point in time that your entire world will see whatever was posted.
I have realized in the last year how important privacy can be when it comes to the internet and in general. The internet has an abundance of creeps and other low-lives that just want to steal your personal information and even ruin your life. Even though Facebook is a very mature project at this point in its history, and is constantly evolving, I am hoping they make and effort to warn or even protect people out there from identity theft, infidelity, and stalking and job loss stupidity when they use this site. I would also encourage others protect your privacy at all times whether you are on or off the internet.
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