Facebook – Protecting Your Privacy

Why Facebook Is Emasculating And How To Stop It

The solution, of course, is to delete your profile. And while some Conservatives complain about Facebook (as the ROK article above does), many conservatives and libertarians use Facebook. And Facebook is hardly liberal in the sense that it generates billions of dollars of revenue a year while spending millions on accountants to minimize taxes.

This is why I am not joining the left’s ‘bash Facebook’ chorus. Facebook is a capitalism success story that makes so much money not only because it’s addicting, but also because of advertising. It meets a need; people choose to use Facebook because they derive some sort of enjoyment from it, and advertisers also find it useful for generating business and leads. If Facebook were as awful as the left insists it is, people would simply choose to not use it and it would go away Myspace.

Most people who use Facebook don’t really understand all the features of the site. While the features may be intended be helpful, in an Orwellian sense they can be used ‘spy’ on you. Deleting your profile is sometimes not good enough. You need to make sure your name is not tagged or shows up in a Google or Facebook search, which can be determined by running this query into Google to see if your name is on Facebook:

site:http://facebook.com “your name”

This is always public, and Google is very efficient at indexing public content posted on Facebook.

And run this query into the browser address bar to see if your name is on Facebook:

https://www.facebook.com/search/str/(your name)

(you must be logged in for it to work)

If someone on Facebook mentions your name and his profile privacy setting is set to ‘public’, your name may show up in a search of both Facebook.com and Google. It may also appear if he tags you in a photo. This information can be accessed by the general public.

To fully escape the reach of Facebook, you will have to tell your friends to not mention you and to not upload pictures of you.

Care must be taken to not post stuff on Facebook that may harm you later if someone were to find it on a search of Facebook or Google linking to your name. If your friend mention your name in an embarrassing light, you have to tell him to remove it since that information may be visible on Facebook or Google even if your profile is squeaky clean and private.

Part of the problem is that SJWs (or anyone) can use this information to incriminate you. And most employers being the spineless cowards that they are won’t stand-up for employees and will fire them for the smallest of imagined offences to ‘save face’. The economy may also be to blame in that the supply of labor vastly exceeds supply, so it’s often no skin off their back to get rid of you; there will always be replacements, especially in the low-skills sectors of the economy. Employers can just uses these as excuses to cut payroll. The problem is not technology. Instead it’s the values of society, where we have to be paranoid.