The number one facebook blog www.allfacebook.com has a guide for sale that show you how to manage your privacy settings on facebook.

The Holy Grail of Facebook Privacy is a simple guide to protecting yourself on Facebook and making sure you never end up with an embarrassing situation that could have lasting repercussions, potentially even costing your job.

It runs to 24 detailed pages. This is not for normal people. Normal people will not buy this book. Normal people will not read a detailed 24 page guide to navigating the privacy setting on facebook. Normal people will not keep updating and curating setting at the level of detail required as their social networks morph and grow. Facebook privacy is not attainable by normal people. The settings are just too complicated and detailed. They are too offputting and require too much attention and curation.

The result: Here's a light-hearted take on how your sense of privacy is easily compromised by people like your Mom.
Facebook, Twitter Revolutionizing How Parents Stalk Their College-Aged Kids

Here's how it easily compromised by you:

Conclusion: Facebook's privacy setting are truly only a fig-leaf of protection. They only serve to protect us from the embarassament we feel. About what we know to be the truth of human nature.

Joe Drumgoole invited me to join him on his regular technology slot on "The Right Hook" last Monday. Good fun. I relayed a couple of tales illustrating some of the pretty unexpected ways innocent use of Facebook could end up biting you in the *ss. These are not isolated incidents. There's a story in the paper every day. In fact, as if to prove the point Darren from Putplace picked up this story on breaking news right after the show.

A winger with Crystal Palace, shared the fact that he was about to have a trial with Fulham with a select group of his friends via Facebook. Or so he thought. The details of the message could be seen by all 2.7m members of the site who have joined its London section. As a member of the London section himself he unwittingly broke the story to supporters of both clubs and to anyone else in the capital interested in reading candid transfer gossip.

People misunderstand privacy all the time. Sinead O'Cochrane seemed to experience the recent symposium as scaremongering. While I experienced it as low key and leavened with humour. I'd love to think it rose to the energy levels fit for a scaremongering label but it just doesn't stick for me. I was first of the panel to speak and my first words were a reminder that its important not to focus on the negative side and to remember there is much that is positive in online interaction. I then said that "Whatever goes on the internet stays on the internet" Mostly because there's a story in the paper everyday of people being surprised at some outcome of this reality. Even though it would seem naive for anyone to think otherwise, people continue to be shocked. Everyday. Also Daniel's keynote talk focused on stories that had humurous connotations as opposed to the many more numerous stories that have tragic endings. Damien Mulley quickly opened the talk up to the audience and it was clear that this was the stuff that was on their collective minds. As I said in this post, talks on privacy have a habit of going round in circles with nobody getting much satisfaction. Ask someone if they care about privacy by using that abstract term and they will shrug. Ask them how they feel about someone tracking their every move and they'll admit that it makes them feel a little bit

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You go to a party. Meet a girl. Photos are taken. They end up on Facebook. Girl's brothers issue Fatwa. Suddenly you've got £20,000 bounty on your head.

I was asked to speak at a Darklight symposium. I must admit I wasn't sure if I could afford the time. I'm at a sensitive time with my business, you see. I was told the talk was on privacy. I was like. Oh in that case. I should. Then I heard that the keynote was by Daniel Solove. And I was like "Are you kidding!?" "Why didn't you say that in the first place!" The thing is there's a load of old rubbish talked about privacy. Its nobody fault really. Its just that people often find they are talking at cross purposes. The problem is that we all think we know what privacy is. That is until we are asked to define it. It then it turns out that nobody can. And that everyone has a half-baked opinion. The situation always reminds me of the story of the blind men and the elephant

Six blind men were asked to determine what an elephant looked like by feeling different parts of the elephant's body. The blind man who feels a leg says the elephant is like a pillar; the one who feels the tail says the elephant is like a rope; the one who feels the trunk says the elephant is like a tree branch; the one who feels the ear says the elephant is like a hand fan; the one who feels the belly says the elephant is like a wall; and the one who feels the tusk says the elephant is like a solid pipe. Discussions begin but each man is so sure that his own experience is definitive that the discussion goes nowhere or devolves into an argument of almost religious proportions. A wise man steps forward and explains to them: All of you are right. The reason every one of you is telling it differently is because each one of you touched the different part of the elephant. So, actually the elephant has all the features you mentioned.

In discussions on Privacy, Daniel J. Solove is your wise man. He has stepped back and taken on the task of defining what privacy is and why it is important. Its a huge task. A task of heroic proportions. But he has succeeded in creating the definitive work on the subject. So what happened at the talk?

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"Amity Island had everything. Clear skies. Gentle surf. Warm water. People flocked there every summer. It was the perfect feeding ground."

As we all know. MySpace, Bebo and Facebook draw predators of their own.

"The police chief of Amity Island tries to protect beachgoers from a great white shark by closing the beach. Tourism is the town's major source of income. The town council must decide whether it is better to protect the livelihoods of their townsfolk. Or the actual lives of a very small percentage of those visiting tourists. The decision to close the beach is overruled. "

Tired of waiting for the social networks to do anything to protect users that might compromise their business, New York state Attorney General Andrew Cuomo's bill Electronic Security and Targeting of Online Predators Act (e-STOP) was introduced in February 2008.

"As the attacks continued, the police chief enlists the help of a marine biologist and a professional shark hunter."

Bebo has been keen to push its credentials in online safety, including the high-profile appointment of Rachel O'Connell, a forensic psychologist, and her work on a number of industry and government councils.

Perverted-Justice volunteers put profiles on social networking sites as decoys order to collect incriminating evidence against the predators.

"We're going to need a bigger boat"

The sheer scale and complexity of social networks makes it impossible for policing activity to have much of an impact on the problem overall.

The dramas of Amity Island and Social networks both pivot on a conflict of interest. Amity Island and social networks depend on public confidence to ensure profitability. In the absence of any real solutions to defend against predators, their businesses depends on their ability to play down the risks. Policing initiatives and warnings to be careful will never solve the actual problem. But they can help lull users into a sense of security that is good for the business. The real effect of policing initiatives and warnings is to confuse the issue of who is responsible when trouble arises. To cut through the confusion again we only have to ask. Is the individual to blame for attracting the predator? When predators are known to be active, is it okay to promote destinations such as Amity Island or Facebook as safe? By the way, Jaws, the movie and book was inspired by this true story of the Jersey Shore attacks of 1916:

Just got the news through Slashdot. Facebook's been talking about their breakthrough in privacy controls for quite some time. They have an elite team working on it and they are highly motivated to resolve the issue. Its pure business logic. A sense of privacy encourages the free expression and authenticity needed for Facebook to become more effective at targeting ads. So I suppose it was inevitable. And Zuckerberg has been filing patents to beat the band. Here's most of the excerpt from Slashdot:

...but take a gander at the Facebook founder's patent application for Dynamically Generating a Privacy Summary to get an idea of what's in the works. After you check boxes on a form to indicate that 'Everyone from San Francisco, CA, Social Network Provider, and Harvard' can see your profile, Zuckerberg's 'invention' will miraculously display: 'People from San Francisco, CA, Social Network Provider, and Harvard can see your profile.' How dare Rolling Stone question his inventiveness!"

Ahem. Not exactly the earth shattering advance we've been primed to expect. All kidding aside. I imagine its really only a matter of time.

From here:

The problem that I'm seeing with most of the current social networks is that 90% of the time spent on those social networks is work that is done in order to maintain currency, keep content fresh, and continue building a sprawling network of friends and raise popularity. So, what does that mean? What it boils down to is this: If you are working for your social network instead of your social network working for you, you my friend, are standing on top of a classic MMO-style treadmill grind. I have bobbed in and out of various social networks and there is something that every single one of them had in common: for me to gain any value from that network, I had to go out of my way to perform repetitive, out-of-band tasks just to gain any value from the network. Having been the victim of many a MMO treadmill grind, I recognize an infinite loop of horse poo when I see it, so I bailed. I have yet to find a measurable value in Facebook or any of a dozen other social networks I've played with. At some point, someone is going to get it "right", and there will be a social network that gives us tremendous value without us having to sacrifice for the cause, and all of the apologists using MySpace, Facebook, and the others who don't know they're apologists will flee to the new network in droves.

If you've been talking to me at all you probably heard me say stuff like this. Connecting 'people 2 info' is trumped by connecting 'people 2 people'. Google is great at connecting people to information. But a better way to create new knowledge is to connect people to people. When you connect to people they discover and create new knowledge. And people find this activity deeply rewarding and highly addictive. As the guys discoverio say '..discovery is the new cocaine'. The company that manages this will be bigger than Google To give people what they want. To really connect people online. We have to create the same sense of privacy, reputation, identity and trust online that we take for granted in the real world. I came across this today. An article riffing on a comment made by a leading VC...

Search is dead...[In the near future, people will] find what they want by using their social network rather than a search algorithm. After all, the people in your online social network should know you better than a mathematical equation, right?

Social discovery pivots on identity

...this focus on online identity is what could turn search upside down... it’s conceivable that the information could attempt to find us—the old concept of push media, but in a far more refined way. As new content enters the Web, it could tumble through the various filters that you set up around your identity...

The unholy mess of privacy and security issues show us where the pivotal opportunity lies

...[currently] nobody owns this space the way Google “owns� search. And as it evolves, there will be an unholy mess of privacy and security issues to work out.

This kind of talk was the ever-constant ever-recurring theme at the Web2.0 expo this last week in San Francisco. And this has made me even more excited about RelevantM than ever. If that were even possible.