http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/12/02/is-your-facebook-personality-genuine/#comments

Okay – can you clarify further? Because yes, if you have stuff open to “friends of friends” your material can spread further than you expect. But you can limit to friends only, excluding friends of friends.

It depends on how well you know all of those friends and on how well you understand how the service works.

Facebook isn’t like your house. It’s more like a gigantic warehouse of 3 walled cubicles and one of those cubicles is leased to you. Not that any of these physical analogies really work.

Technically speaking nothing on FB/the internet is private in the sense that it’s probably possible to get past a lot of privacy protections and access almost anything (though I would argue that this largely requires hacking, if someone has actually configured their privacy protections correctly. Hacking, or a court order). But that doesn’t mean those things *shouldn’t* be private. There are technological means to look into people’s houses and eavesdrop on their conversations, but that doesn’t mean people lose their right to privacy in those settings. Certain internet contexts (where the individual has gone to some effort to create an expectation of privacy) should be the same.

(This requires people to educate themselves about how the internet works, of course, and what kinds of privacy settings they can reasonably establish.)

FWIW, the discussion in my Computer Crime class this semester suggested statutory privacy protections exist for what someone posts on FB.

But keep in mind, there are ways to get past your privacy settings, none of which are hacking and none if which violate the TOS. How many friends have you listed, for example? If you don’t want it public, don’t put it in the public domain. Facebook is public domain no matter what “privacy” settings you use. It’s a public site accessed by millions of people. Seriously, how can anybody reasonably expect anything on the internet to remain private?

I was interested in your comment re: the “backwoods.” This is one powerful thing that blogs can combat: the isolation that many of us experience when we end up someplace where we’re the only expert in our field, and/or we’re isolated in other ways from the rest of the faculty (e.g. by sex, race, sexuality, etc.) As I have discussed here before, and as have you, Prof. Z: isolation is a key tool of bullies. Blogs can un-isolate us by connecting us to a group of likeminded people who are engaged in some of the same struggles.