I have never been the promoter of these so called, community sites. Nevertheless, I had to join a few, since I felt that I would be left behind in this fast age of the internet. I have always felt that the community sites are not designed to protect the privacy of a person. For example, on orkut, just about anyone can check out your profile and the messages, or “scraps”(I don’t understand how that word came about), that are exchanged between you and your friends. It depersonalizes your communication. Similar case with facebook. The thing about this community sites is that before you get hang of it, you have already revealed a lot about yourselves to the world. Since they are in their nascent stage, this seem to pose no harm, but things could turn otherwise in not so distant future.
Just today I read somewhere that Facebook founders and administrators have decided to make the user information available to their partners. So analyze this. You have selected the option that your profile will be public only to your friends, or to friends of friends. But now after this decision from Facebook, your friends and their friends may not be able to access the personal information like phone number and address, but a third party company will have the full access to your details, which me end up spamming your life!!
Would you want to test whether things go bad? I personally will not want to have a first hand experience. So I went to my profile page and deleted as much personal information, which I didn’t want a telemarketing guy to get hold of, as possible. Now I leave it to the mercy of the Facebook. I hope you do the same.
If these move by Facebook is really beneficial to it’s users, I can surely include my details later……