By Carmel DeAmicis
November 29, 2013
It could be the headline to an Onion article. It should be the headline to an Onion article. But in this case the story is real and the joke is on me.
I recently learned this horrifying fact. Although my privacy settings on Facebook were set to “friends only,” anyone with a Facebook account could access my wall. What the hell Facebook?
I’m of the Millennial Generation, the sort raised to share my photos, status updates, and tweets with abandon. I’ve been doing so since the MySpace days in junior high, when Facebook wasn’t even a thing. I’m trained, conditioned even, not to give much of a damn about my privacy.
Whenever scandals would erupt over Facebook’s privacy settings because hackers could access users’ contact information or apps were sharing user data, I would roll my eyes. I didn’t care if advertisers could target me based on my profile information or people could tag me in photos without my permission. I didn’t care that the new Timeline made it easy for my Facebook friends to dig up old stories from my past. These are all natural side effects of being online, the price I paid for social.
Plus I always had one reassurance to keep me safe: as long as my Facebook wall was set to be viewed by Facebook friends only, Facebook was a safe enough place for me. I could be silly or swear, whine about a bad day or gleefully post party pictures from the weekend before. I wasn’t dumb enough to say anything that could hurt me professionally, but my Facebook profile was definitely a personal representation, not meant for the public’s eye.
And now, I realize my posts have been public for anyone with an account to see. For god knows how long. Despite my settings still saying “friends only.” What the hell?
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