Losing control

Do yourself a favour, visit your Facebook settings and download a copy of your Facebook data.

I convince myself that my posts and photos on Facebook are private.

Kathryn McConnachie, junior journalist, ITWeb

While I had always had some inkling that such an option was available, I never really thought it necessary to see exactly how much data Facebook has on me.

I've been a fairly responsible Facebook citizen. While I have had the odd status update that turned out to be not quite as funny as I may have thought it was at the time, I haven't been plotting to overthrow the government or my boss. I haven't been secretly sharing potentially embarrassing photos, or sending inappropriate messages.

But I've also been wearing blinkers to some extent when it comes to my online information.

I believe it when Facebook tells me I have control over my information. I convince myself that my posts and photos on Facebook are private, because they are only visible to my friends (and in some cases, friends of friends).

Mostly my sense of online privacy comes from the fact that my Facebook status doesn't show up in a Google search.

I think to some extent we are all aware of the fact that by using social media services, we are constantly feeding information about ourselves into an essentially bottomless pit.

But the reality of just how much of ourselves and our lives that is actually online only really hits home, though, when you go beyond just scrolling down your Facebook wall until your fingers start to cramp.

After covering the issues relating to privacy and Facebook, I thought it was time I actually took some of my own advice and found out just how much information I've fed to the social network.

Facebook told me it would take a while to prepare my data records, and it would e-mail me when the entire file was ready for download.

After about half an hour I clicked on the link to start the download. The zipped folder was 134MB. It includes a total of 1 953 files and 57 folders. Just one of the files was a copy of my entire Facebook wall dating back to 2007, and includes every status update, wall post and comment made by both myself and my friends, even ones I thought I had deleted.

Another file was a copy of my entire Facebook message inbox, with full conversation threads. There was also a list of all of the events I'd ever clicked “Attending” on.

Included in the download were also all of my photo albums and every photo of me currently tagged on Facebook. It's quite clear that Facebook knows more about me than my mom does.

If I were to become the subject of an investigation, that folder I downloaded from Facebook would be an investigator's Holy Grail. If someone needed to know who I talk to and where I like to go, and even, to an extent, how I think - they would have it all in front of them, in a neatly zipped folder.

For some, this type of realisation is enough to lead them to shut down their Facebook accounts and run for the hills. But in this day and age of social media, for most of us, that's not really an option.

As much as it makes us uneasy that there is all this information about us sitting out there, the thought of not using Facebook is even more unnerving.

It's precisely all of that information of ours that has become entwined with the service that keeps us going back. In fact, for some, Facebook isn't so much a service as it is their own personal place on the Web in much the same way as a blog is.

Despite all the evidence to the contrary, we still see our Facebook pages as our own.

But what do we do once the blinkers come off and we're confronted with the blinding reality that once we put something on Facebook, or any other online service, that 'something' is no longer in our control?

As much as we like to check the different boxes in our privacy settings to lull us into a sense of security, when it comes down to it, we can't control what happens at Facebook or its security.

Moving to Google+ is also just another instance of shifting information beyond our control.

If we sign up to use these services, we're signing up to the risk associated with them too. Just as the analysts always say - it's the user's responsibility to decide just how much information they share.

Every utterance online should be treated as if it were a public post. Even if it's just a message to a group of friends, as soon as the 'send' button has been clicked, control over who sees it no longer lies with the sender.

We can't manage Facebook's security systems. We can't even manage our friends. All it takes is one friend forwarding the message to another, or someone taking a screen shot or someone else leaving the message open on their computer.

In the face of all the endless possibilities, ticking boxes in our privacy settings is seemingly futile.

Social media is slowly and consistently chipping away at traditional notions of privacy. We're being subtly (and not so subtly) strong-armed into sharing more and more information.

Privacy online is a myth. And once we are aware of that, we can be more careful in the way we use services like Facebook. Awareness is the only real protection we have.

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Does Google+ privacy add up?