Is privacy a lie?

Like everyone else in our Social Networking and Business class, when we got our first glimpse of Facebook Mirror and learned that our privacy settings weren't nearly as protective as we might have thought, I quickly signed onto Facebook and raised security settings to near-maximum level. Our guest speaker's lecture was most illuminating. Despite setting virtually everything to "Friends Only" and ensuring that people could only see the bare bones aspects of my profile via Facebook Mirror, I couldn't quite get rid of that niggling little question: Would it be enough?

Back when Facebook started, when it was only available to students, privacy settings were simple: If you didn't allow everyone to see your profile, they simply couldn't. Facebook has truly grown into a mainstream Internet application in that privacy settings are not always what they appear to be, and there are often loopholes around privacy settings. What's more, there has been frequent difficulty in the past for people who have simply wanted to delete their profiles rather than simply disable them and leave all of their information on Facebook.

A recent episode of Law and Order dealt with the Internet, and Elliot Stabler, played by Christopher Meloni, suggests that posting pictures or any data on the Internet is effectively making it immortal. It is almost impossible to purge it from the Internet entirely unless you have total control over it, or it is relatively obscure. We've made ourselves immortal on Facebook, in a way - just look at how many people pay respects to the Facebook profiles of the recently deceased. However, we may also have to live with not having as much control of our privacy regarding our immortality as we thought.