Senator Al Franken Facebook privacy settings

No, those links at the bottom aren't adsense. He's not that web savvy!

Evidently he's given a lot of thought to the flow and control of personal information posted by users on the internet. It would be nice if websites followed the "opt in" rather than the "opt out" route when it comes to these things. It would be even nicer if some senator made this the defacto standard...

I don't have a problem with opt-out when you sign up for a web service. For example, on Twitter the default is for your stream to be open to the public but you can opt to lock your account so only approved users can follow you.

That leads to stronger network effects faster, and creates a more usable tool for everyone.

The problem I have with facebook (note: I don't have a facebook account) is that people signed up based on a particular set of terms but the company then changed those terms and switched a default opt-in to a default opt-out after the fact.

Yes, and this is the same sort of problem many people had with Buzz. Your contact list was private, and then -- wham! -- there it is (or parts of it) for the world to see. (And your profile à la Buzz started aggregating Google-related activity; even if aspects of it were not previously designated "private", hanging it all off of your profile sure made it more accessible.)

If you knew at the start that that would happen, it might have stopped you from giving them -- originally and mostly through Gmail -- your contacts list. (Or using other affected services.) But when you signed up, they were all about "privacy" -- particularly after their previous efforts to reassure people in the face of concerns over automated ad targeting in Gmail. (Which was its own event, but I guess people generally decided that, as long as its purely automated and doesn't affect anything more than ad presentation, they could live with it.)

Hmm... as a thought exercise, what if your Gmail content starts affecting not just ad presentation but your search results. Would you have a bit more concern, then?

What if your employer starts examining employees' "customized" search results (perhaps by hiring a third party that specialized in this) and making inferences?

I assume they can and some may well already log and analyze the ads returned on those searches. Now that ads are starting to "follow people" across searches and sessions -- at least at some sites -- what personal habits might you inadvertently be bringing with you to work, via third parties' tracking of and response to your web use?