It’s been a big year for social networking, and no one has caught more flak about privacy and security issues than the world’s number 1 social network, Facebook. 2011 was chock full of stories exposing chinks in Facebook’s security and privacy armor, including an embarrassing faux pas just a few weeks ago wherein Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s private photos were made public for a short time, revealing intimate images of Zuck with his dog and girlfriend (no, not that kind of intimate!) that had been in a private album. But there’s more where that came from.
In 2011, new Facebook sign-ups reached an all time high, even as Google sought to up the ante with the introduction of its own social network, Google +. Google took advantage of some of the most glaring mistakes in Facebook privacy by introducing Circles as a way to control which contacts can view the things you post. It also offered a lot more space for writing, too. You could post a War and Peace sized piece of your mind without hitting a limit. Not long after this, however, Facebook spruced up its act by including many of those features in its own way. Here’s the current state of things with Facebook privacy:
