Problems With Facebook Privacy

I recently read an article telling folks to chill out with there concerns on Facebook privacy issues.  It, as many others have, addresses the issues of people’s purchases and interests being mined for advertising.  The commenst response I see to those concerns is here.  In the article, TechCrunch does a decent job of telling everyone that their concerns in that fashion are utterly baseless.  There hasn’t been purchase privacy since credit cards were widely adopted.  And Gmail ended the privacy of personal transactions being shielded from advertisers.

But here’s the privacy that I worry about the most.  It’s privacy between my different social groups.  I don’t care about search robots, about marketing data mining, or about stupid game application notifications.  I’ve dealt with those almost all of my life.  What I care about is the fact that I don’t tell people in my family about what happened in college for a reason, but if one of my college friends tags me in a photo, all my friends see it.

In that same vein, why must privacy be retroactive.  We all know that quieting a story of some politician doing something nefarious never works.  We know that being accused of a crime is almost as good for our reputation as actually committing it.  And since that is true, what on earth is the use of retroactive intra-personal privacy to anyone?  I would rather a system that assumes privacy, rather than asks me to be continually online, waiting to react to something somebody else posts.