By Ken Jackson
Staff Writer

Facebook — a great online tool for catching up with old friends and sharing experiences and pictures with family who live great distances away.

But, if you think that's all you’re communicating to the world if you're not careful, then maybe you're the tool.

Facebook, first launched in 2004, and geared solely to college-age students (to register, a user needed a school-based e-mail address), enables users to choose their own privacy settings to control who can see what parts of their profiles. Users can limit access to their comments, “friend” lists, pictures and backgrounds to just their online friends.

But, independent programmers have shown that during site upgrades, Facebook often resets settings to the default “Everyone” without the user’s knowledge.

For example, a user whose "Family and Relationships" information was set to "Friends Only" could default to being viewable by "Everyone," making previously-protected information public unless users were proactive about their settings.

In general, Facebook is a safe site. Hackers generally add online code to their own pages and aren't mining other folks’ pages for sensitive information. It's users who are their own worst enemies, for example, by posting status updates with details of their holiday plans, which can be an open invitation to burglars — posting your address is a profile option.

Peter Burns, a San Francisco Web developer and co-founder of Openbook (www.youropenbook.org), a Facebook-parody site that shows just how public its content can be, said the “Show Everyone” setting is the biggest culprit.

“The default privacy settings have become more private since we started,” Burns, who helped create Openbook in May, said. “However, posts are still public by default, so we expect that people will still be sharing things publicly without their knowledge.

“Ideally, they would give indication of how public the information you share will be at the time that you're sharing it. Every other communications media that you use every day — e-mail, Twitter, telephone — makes it clear to both the sender and recipient who the message was sent to. Facebook does not.”

Openbook features a search box that enables users to search for specific words or phrases in the statuses of users who make them available to "Everyone.” This could prove damaging for some over-glib users (i.e., “I hate my boss,” “my DUI”).

But the feature is not a hack, simply built upon Facebook's own Application Programming Interface.

“My advice for Facebook is to set nothing to 'Everyone,'” Burns said. “Any information that you're comfortable being completely public, set that to 'Friends of Friends.'  Everything else should be 'Friends Only.'

“If you want to scare the bejeezus out of yourself, spend a little time reading what information brokers are able to determine about you.”

For teenagers (users must be 13 to create a profile), Burns encourages a “Friends only” privacy level — for everything.

Colleen Arago, of Kissimmee, said she makes herself aware of what others can read on her profile. The 16-year-old said she wants to draw the line between people she knows and not with those she doesn't.

“Facebook has become so popular, it's important to make sure you know what's being exposed, and who's seeing it,” she said. “I do use constant discretion of what I post, and I make my mom’s day when I show her my Facebook. She feels that she can trust me.”

Arago said she'd closely monitor her teenager's usage if she were a parent.

“I would make sure they did not share anything with people who they have not 'friended,' and check their friends list every once and a while,” she said.

St. Cloud's Jeannette Girdner, the mother of grown children, said she uses Facebook to keep up with them.

“It a great way to keep up with what's happening in their lives that they don't necessarily share openly,” she said. “I am careful what I post due to the fact that anyone and everyone could read it and would not want to offend others, especially with my position at my work place.

“It amazes me how the next generation could care less of the content of their page. If I still had teenagers, I would definitely look more into all of this.”

Longtime youth basketball coach Bill Slovik, of Kissimmee, said that while he doesn't feel too guarded about his Facebook account, within reason (“I would not add my boss”), he said he would go to lengths to protect his family.

“I really don't concern myself with the privacy issue. The value of the social networking, in my opinion, outweighs the negatives,” he said. “I've been able to reconnect with friends I have not seen since high school and players that I have not spoken with in years. I would probably not allow them to have a page before the age of 17. It was designed with adults in mind as an alternative to Myspace. I don't see the need for 15-year-olds to be on it.”

Burns said that in light of recent controversy, Facebook does seem to be taking users’ feelings of security into account.

“Facebook has done an incredible job from a technical level of implementing complex, granular controls over the privacy of information in their system,” he said. “But they are doing a terrible job of communicating how private your information is.”

“All that said, I find myself still very wary of using Facebook. I've lost a ton of trust over the years as they've pulled the rug out from under people so many times.”