If your kids comment on a friend’s public status update, that information becomes public, even if your children keep all their Facebook privacy settings limited to visibility among friends only.

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In Iran, logging onto Facebook isn’t just a fun way to pass the time and catch up with friends. It’s a crime—punishable by jail time.

Houshang Fanaian found that out the hard way. The 47-year-old Baha’I man was awarded one more year in prison for his session on the social networking site.

He had previously been sentenced for acting against national security and “insulting the country’s supreme leader” because of his religious activism, according to Radio Free Europe.

Fanaian’s sentencing may be a rarity, but his case and others indicate that Iranian authorities are keeping a closer eye on Iranians’ Facebook activities.

According to some activists, authorities have taken to sending rights campaigners and intellectuals they suspect of engaging in anti-state activities a friend request to determine what information is being posted.

The country banned its citizens from using the social networking site, but despite that (or maybe, in part, because of it) the social media site has become even more popular within the country.

Users log on using pseudonyms and some use the open forum to discuss political developments with people both in and out of the country.

Facebook has also been used in Iran, as it has many other countries, to advertise in-person protests. One such protest occurred in February, “where a protest to support the Arab uprising attracted tens of thousands of Iranians to the streets,” Radio Free Europe said. Since then, the organizers of the event have been held under house arrest.

Even university students in Iran report being questioned and even facing discipline for their Facebook pages. In one case, a student who had posted photos of a private party was questioned because of the display of what some considered “immoral” behavior.

Although the Iranian government is trying to rule by fear, Facebook users are finding a work-around: Many have created two Faceboook pages, one under their real name and a secret one where they post about state politics, the poor condition of the economy, lack of freedom and other grievances.

But we wonder if this work-around is a good long-term solution. After all, Facebook’s rules state users can’t have duplicate accounts. If authorities shut down Iranian citizens’ duplicate pages, will government be, in essence, destroying the free speech and networking they’ve tried to foster in the first place?

Readers, do you think Facebook should allow users to have more than one account?

As Facebook grows to integrate with more and more consumer and search sites, they are probably realizing their users are getting confused about what this means, and how these sites know what restaurant their ex-neighbor recently visited.
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Despite ongoing security concerns (the most recent of which is the koob worm), Facebook has been named the number 15 most trusted company in the US. A survey conducted by Ponemon Institute and TRUSTe, the Internet privacy trustmark company, has revealed a short list of what people feel are the most trustworthy companies around, in terms of Privacy Security.

The survey sample consisted of 6,486 adult consumers in the US, and resulted in 706 companies being named. 211 of these companies actually made the cut, including Facebook. So who took the number one spot? American Express, which was in the same position last year. eBay follows as the second most trusted company, with IBM, Amazon and Johnson & Johnson completing the top five.
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As a popular online social network, Facebook is quite useful for spreading the word on things like political causes, and events. Need a few friends of friends to show up at your party? Post the event on Facebook, and all those friends of friends are likely to see the event. I can’t tell you how many event planners befriend hundreds of Facebook users in a particular geographic area, for the sole purpose of promoting a weekend party.
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Today at the OMMA Social in New York City, Seth Goldstein, founder of social media advertising network SocialMedia, announced a new service for advertisers called “Friendship Ranks.” The new service combines data related to peoples’ interactions on Facebook applications to generate more effectively targeted ads. Seth also formally announced “social banners”, a service the company has been experimenting with over the past few months.

The “social banners” are an opt-out advertising service which resides within Facebook applications. Sound familiar? The whole Facebook beacon “fiasco” (as it was coined by the press), was due to it being an opt-out service. SocialMedia has been able to figure out a way to display your friends within advertisements that are present on applications. Technically, they’ve also figured out a way to display a fair amount of this information outside of Facebook.

Two weeks ago while attending the Graphing Social Patterns East conference, one of the attendees approached me to show a page on SocialMedia.com’s website that was able to display targeted ads to me based on information they had collected. I have included a screenshot below. Initially, I chose not to write a post on the issue because I wanted to make sure I got all the facts right.

Read more on the Social Times.

Jay Meattle has a great post which includes the following image of traffic to the privacy settings within Facebook:

Jay suggests that the above chart illustrates that users need to be further educated about privacy on Facebook. For what many in the blogosphere and mainstream media have coined the “Beacon Fiasco” it appears that it may not have actually been as much of a fiasco for Facebook. Approximately half a percent of users visit their privacy settings each week. Following the announcement that Facebook profiles would be accessible to search engines privacy settings traffic doubled. This is in contrast to traffic following the Beacon Fiasco which was ultimately flat.

Do Facebook users care about privacy? According to Jay they definitely do and the spike in traffic following Facebook’s decision to grant search engine access to user profiles should illustrate users’ concern for their privacy. The lack of traffic growth during the Beacon Fiasco implies that users were not thoroughly educated on the issue. Honestly, who’s job is it to educate the user? Should users self-educate or should this be a role that Facebook plays?

My opinion is that the user should educate them self just as they do prior to signing a contract. What do you think?

Security on Facebook seems to be a constant concern for everyone. No where is this more important than in the business world. The idea is simple, if you create a private group for our employees you don’t want random people finding your network and joining it.

I ran across a business blog called SMUG that is putting some security aspects of Facebook to the test. SMUG has set up a private network and trying to see if anyone one can join it. You can visit the blog for all the details but the basic rundown is this pretty simple.

Basically SMUG will pay anyone 100 dollars if they can find information about its new network in the Facebook news feed. They are also providing 200 dollars for anyone that can join the network and upload an image. SMUG is giving you the name and location of the network and is actually hoping that you can break into their group.

It will be interesting to see if Facebook’s private security measures fail when money is on the line. I say give it a shot, read the SMUG blog and see if you can win a couple hundred dollars. Let me know how it works out. Happy hunting.

One thing about Facebook is they sure listen. When Facebook’s user base cries, like a bird coming to its chics, Facebook opens up and supplies an answer. The most recent uproar coming from the Facebook crowd was something we have been following for a few days. The reported problem of deleting user data from Facebook.

Facebook gave no concrete information on how or when these changes would take place, but in the perfect PR sense, Facebook is playing damage control. Facebook is trying to stop the flood of complaints before it becomes a true ocean of complaints. According to Mark Hawthorn, of The Age, nearly 10,000 people have joined the group called “How to permanently delete your Facebook account.”

Facebook is taking a page from the ‘Scrabulous’ page and trying to stop another Facebook movement before it gets out of hand. As we have seen in the past Facebook users tend to join groups and movements that directly effect them. Facebook should be commended for trying to fix a problem before it gets totally out of hand.

I am not letting Facebook off the hook, there should have been clear instructions on how best to delete your profile, but they did (in a round about way) tell users how to delete their account. At the same time privacy protection has to be on the forefront of every Facebook users mind.

Both users and Facebook should learn from this experience. Facebook shouldn’t assume that users are going to jump through hoops to try and delete profiles. Users shouldn’t assume that Facebook is going to spoon feed them solutions to every problem. As social networks grow and change there are going to be growing pains. We shouldn’t light the torches and grab the pitch forks every time we think a new monster is coming.

How do you think Facebook is handling the situation? Is Facebook taking the proper steps to protect user data? Are users expecting to much from Facebook? Let me know.

I’ve been having a back-and-forth with an acquaintance of mine over Facebook for a while now. Whenever I see him post pictures of his young grandchildren I send him a message warning him that his Facebook friends can see them, and that perhaps his privacy settings should be stronger.

Every time he asks me “can you see them now?” and every time I say “yep” a few times until he finally fixes it.

I also have a friend who bragged to me that she has very few contacts, and that nobody can see any of her pictures unless she adds them as friends. Well, she was right. At least, she was right about all of the pictures that hadn’t at one point been used as her profile picture (which happened to be virtually none of them). All a person would have to do to access them is message her and any response would open up her not-so-limited profile.

She certainly didn’t know that this was the case. Does she realize that applications encourage me to add her pictures to a public database, like the celebrity face matcher that I mentioned earlier today?

I’m not making any complaints about Facebook’s privacy settings. In fact, aside from the Beacon fiasco and the fact that applications can access my pictures through my friends’ profiles, I’m generally very impressed.

I’m merely suggesting that the average users may be overconfident in their sense of privacy. Is it Facebook’s responsibility to make sure we take the time to learn how to use the site’s were using properly? Also, is there really any legitimate expectation of privacy?

… and if not, and we’ve entered the public sphere by joining Facebook, will this have legal implications? People who enter the public sphere give up a ton of privacy rights.

Let me know what you think.

- Jonathan Kleiman