A letter to Mom, on her initial Facebook voyage...

Glad you're on FaceBook--now you can follow everyone's status as to what they had for lunch or when they've had a prolonged fart.

In all seriousness, FaceBook is a very useful thing. It's great for keeping up with long lost friends, family, following causes or even celebrities you like, and a lot more. Seriously, it's a good thing.

As long as it's used wisely. Let me explain. (And once you're using it wisely, you'll be able to use it happily and without that "this technology concerns me" feeling.)

There's a reason you can't access my FB (that's the parlance for "FaceBook") account. I have very specifically set up my account with permissions that don't give my personal information away willy-nilly. One question might be, 'why would you do that, if it's a "social network"?'

Good question.

You may have seen/read of privacy problems with social networks recently. (<-- That's a link; click it if you want to learn more, and it'll come up in your browser.) Actually, these problems have been going on for some time (years.) Bottom line is, your privacy settings--who you let see your private info--are by default open to the world. No problem so far, one would think. But there is a problem with it.

That information is potentially available to anyone. Anyone is including spammers, scammers, hackers, advertisers, etc. etc. etc.

Now, the next good question would be, "Well, I only have a little personal info on FB, so why should that be a concern?"

As you know, I've been in the tech industry for some time. I know what those folks can do with the tiniest scrap of information about you -- they will scoop it all up and try to correlate it with all the other data they've scraped up from all sorts of other sources. Got your name? Oh, now they can figure out your nickname on other sites. Then they can figure out all sorts of other stuff, like where you go to often (that's that thing called "cookies", which are a good thing, but they use it to track you.) And that's about the most benign thing (you'll get more ads or spam.) Others can do much more malicious things.

So, what to do, now that I've panicked you?

Simple: Take control of your privacy. This will involve a couple of steps, but they're all painless.

First, go to your FB account and in the upper right hand corner, click "Account". Go down to "Privacy settings". Once in there, systematically review all the settings. Many are set to a default of "Everyone". I suggest you consider each one, and if you have any question, set it instead to "Friends only" or "Don't Share". There, you're mostly done.

Next -- and this one is important -- DON'T participate in any of the silly FB "apps". These are usually games, surveys, etc. These are things like "Farmville", "Bejewelled", "Mob Wars", "Beatles Song I'm Most Like", etc. Be aware that these "games" are not FB itself, but are third party companies. To use them, you have to give up your personal info that you've made available. If you did the step just above, you're somewhat protected; but still, don't use them.

Think about it; where does FB make its money? From advertising. Those third party game companies gobble up that personal info and then they're free to sell it to the ad aggregators--the ones that track you.

Finally, if you have friends who use those silly games/surveys/etc., tell them to stop it. They're just giving away all their info to advertisers etc. And here's the worst part: because of the legal agreements, they're also giving away all of their friends' personal info. So you've protected yourself to a degree by doing step 1 above, but all their other friends probably haven't.

That all being said (and I realize it all sounds alarmist,) it is great you're on FB. It really is a great tool as long as you keep safe. Just be a bit skeptical and use the technology, rather than the technology using you.

Finally, if you like, spread the word. I'll post this to my blog: click here.