Blame Yourself for Facebook's Lack of Privacy

Facebook is submitting to a government crackdown on privacy, and Mark Zuckerberg acknowledges “a bunch of mistakes” on that front. But the site’s privacy issues are as much our own fault as Zuck’s, writes Farhad Manjoo in Slate. The “idea that we can control the audience for anything we post online” is simply “misguided,” he writes. “The entire point of Facebook is to allow us to connect and share stuff.”

The site “is thus, by its very nature, one of the most intrusive technologies ever built—and, for better or worse, we’re stuck with it.” So how do we deal with such intrusion? Forget about some "privacy silver bullet." Assume anything you post online will be available for public consumption. Even posts marked “friends only” can be copied by friends and distributed more widely. Indeed, “the only sure way to keep something private on Facebook is not to post it to Facebook." Click for the full essay. (More Facebook stories.)