Image by Getty Images via Daylife

Gone are the days when people wrote long letters to each other and waited for weeks on end till they got a reply back. Today, all it takes is a click to open a social networking site and a few strokes of the keyboard to convey any message that you want to your family or friends. Take Facebook for example. The popularity of the site is increasing every day ( going by its membership figures of 300 million) and its youngest members are still in school. But is there really too much of a good thing? People often argue that while such sites have made staying in touch so much easier, we also pay a price in terms of privacy. Are we aware that a lot of information we thought was private is actually in the open for the entire world to see?

To Like or Not to Like
Think of Facebook as community where people in your friend list know what you’re up to, what you are doing and even what you think. If that wasn’t enough, your friends are free to comment on anything that appears in your Facebook page as well. That is because Facebook offers both a Live Feed and a News Feed. The Live Feed shows you everything that’s happening within your friends circle. For instance you will be notified when a friend comments on a photo or another updates her status. On the other hand the News Feed is filtered by Facebook and consists of stories or links that the website thinks a user would enjoy based on factors like your friends commenting on the story. Needless to say, many Facebook users are outraged at the idea of the website itself making certain decisions for them. And exactly why would people be keen to know every little thing their friends do?

This week, Facebook laid out the next phase in its plan to rule the Web when it introduced a “Like” button that will be embedded on sites accross the Internet. The little “thumbs up” icon that many Facebook users have used to show approval for their friends activities is already featured on sites like CNN, and expected to show up on shopping sites, entertainment sites and beyond. In the words of Facebook CEO, Mark Zuckerburg, at the launch of this new feature, “We’re going to serve one billion ‘like’ buttons on the Web” in the first 24 hours.

Over-sharers Beware
Many users are also waking up to the fact that every time they click the ‘like’ feature on an application or news item, their ‘like’ and profile photo will appear on the page that has been flagged. In other words, this is akin to a Digg like function, where content can be flagged with the only difference being that the content immediately appears in the status feed. This is just the beginning because very soon Facebook will also give you the option to ‘ like’ content that appears on entertainment and news websites; the only hitch being that all will be revealed in your status feeds. In other words, your friends will know which sites you visited, what you read and so on. How many of us really want the world watching what we do?

The Facebook team justify that any new update made is always tested extensively keeping the user in mind, and that real close knit interaction has only just begun. Facebook users on the other hand are anything but happy. Many feel that every time Facebook makes changes to the site, they are only for the worse. Increasingly, the invasion of one’s privacy is a scary reality.

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Is privacy in the age of social media just an illusion? Signs certainly seem to be pointing that way. Thanks to Google, anyone with access to the Web can quite easily draw an accurate profile of who I am, where I work and what I believe. With the aid of LinkedIn and Twitter, potential employers can form an opinion of recruits without even checking references. I don’t want to debate ethics or the legal implications of such phenomenon, but I just wonder how long it will be before the public starts looking for a way to get out from under the microscope. Or, if Facebook is correct, and we’ll accept that it is now normal for strangers to peer into our most personal space.

Google’s CEO, Eric Schmidt, received a fair amount of criticism when he said in a CNBC interview that, “If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place.” This is probably not what I want to here from the CEO of the company that stores my emails, voicemails, blogs, etc. But it doesn’t make me want to unplug from the web either. I’ve just come to accept the trade-off that balances the power of free-flowing information and our willingness to share what we know.

Popular social networks are literally banking on the fact that there are millions of other people who feel the same way and becoming increasingly lax about their privacy. While Facebook has lured us in with the promise of intimate networks and full privacy controls. Recent changes in their policies have shown that they would rather we opened up and made our lives searchable. After all, that is where the money is. Advertisers would love to know that I’m in the market for a new something-or-other so they can tell me just where to get it at the right price.

As social media develops, I believe the trend will continue towards people opening up and sharing, and over-sharing. It won’t all be bad, because I believe we all gain when ideas are shared and expanded. For now, I’ve drawn the line at geo-location (there’s something creepy about being tracked as a dot on a map). Besides, I still like the option of being fashionably late without my boss knowing that I stopped to get a donut. And it will be a long, long, long time before I’m willing to put my medical records online. Sorry, Google.

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