Facebook revealed a new messaging service yesterday and today when rolling into work I heard some guy on the radio talking about the privacy implications (sadly although I have an FM transmitter attached to my iPod there is a split second between the time I turn my iPod off and when I turn my truck off that exposes me to regular radio).
I thought I’d take a second to remind everybody about the golden rule of Internet privacy. If you don’t want everybody in the world to know something don’t post it online. The Internet was never developed with privacy in mind and although websites often try to make data private eventually that data becomes public through human error or system compromise.
The other thing to remember is the simple fact that putting information on a system you don’t completely control may lead to undesirable consequences. You do not control Facebook as you don’t own their servers. This means all information you post on that site is outside of your realm of control making it impossible to know how secure the data is.
Either way if you follow the golden rule of Internet privacy you should never have a problem.