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The business models of social networks could rely on an ignorance towards privacy from their users, experts say. But recent research indicates normal Facebook users have begun altering their privacy settings to control the information people (and potentially advertisers) can see, which could affect the ability of social networks to make money.

Overview of privacy changes announced by Facebook, May 2010.

boyd, danah. 2010. "Privacy and Publicity in the Context of Big Data." WWW. Raleigh, North Carolina, April 29.

Transcript of danah boyd's keynote speech at 2010 SXSW on common themes in privacy and "being public" in social media.

Social networks typically promise to remove "personally identifying information" before sharing this data, to protect users' privacy. But researchers from the University of Texas at Austin have found that, combined with readily available data from other online sources, this anonymized data can still reveal sensitive information about users.

Techcrunch post on Facebook's privacy changes of 2010 and how they affect us legally.

NYT how-to on strategies for effective use of Facebook - includes privacy settings, user lists, tagging options

Short look at 2010 privacy changes at Facenook, from NYT.

"What purpose does it serve to notify your friends that you're out on the town but to hide the location? And what does it tell us about the future of location-based services & privacy? This was the question I set out to answer by surveying nearly 500 Foursquare users."

Opinion piece on the use of Facebook by faculty. Discusses concerns of privacy and granularity in use of FB by teachers. A bit naive in my opinion but does discuss the issues.

Nice review of Peep Diaries book.

"With more than 500 million people now on Facebook, it's inevitable that you'll be friended by someone you know, but with whom you don't want to share your online life. Once you've accepted them as a friend, how do you avoid them without the awkwardness of unfriending them?"

"This paper explores key issues people experience managing personal boundaries within and across social technologies. We look in particular at email and online social networks. We offer a theoretical framework for understanding the errors in assumptions about the singularity of identity that are currently inscribed into the sharing models of social technology systems. Through a questionnaire study we examine how people facet their identities and their lives, and how these facets are expressed through use of technology. We found for more mature users family was an extremely important context for sharing online, and that email was still a preferred form of communication for private sharing across facets of life. Single, working men had the highest level of incompatible facets, and a higher level of facet incompatibility was correlated with increased worry about sharing in the context of social networks."

Essay on peep culture by Hal Niedzviecki, author of Peep Diaries (one of our texts.) Good overview of the themes in the book.

Amazing study on how Facebook or similar sns data can be used to predict social security numbers.

"We've known for years that the Web allows for unprecedented voyeurism, exhibitionism and inadvertent indiscretion, but we are only beginning to understand the costs of an age in which so much of what we say, and of what others say about us, goes into our permanent - and public - digital files."

Just what the title says - the author lays out why using Facebook is a bad idea and why you should take the big step and quit Facebook.

Article on the different strategies of Google v. Facebook and the different strategies of mining biographical and other user data as practiced by the two companies. From Wired.

... because the Web isn't written in pencil, it's written in ink.

"Facebook will grow their service by allowing people to accrue attention in a way they can't currently in the system. People will realize the same benefits they currently do on Twitter…you can actually start to have an audience that is larger than your current friends list. In other words, this will allow members of Facebook to have a much larger reach than they could before…thus giving Facebook a larger reach as well."