Paul Carr has a very interesting article up on Tech Crunch entitled “NSFW: Facebook Breached My Privacy, And Other Things That Whiny, Entitled Dipshits Say.”

It should be required reading for anyone who is on Twitter, Facebook, has a blog, or engaged in any other form of social networking. I wish I had seen it years ago.

Subsequent wailing about privacy settings on Facebook or any other social network is at best a red herring, at worst disingenuous bullshit. “Oh, but my Facebook account is private…. but my Twitter stream is locked!” Oh please. If all it takes to break a privacy system is for one of your friends to copy and repost your “private” photos or tweets then they’re not private at all. The only true privacy is not to post anything on a social network that you wouldn’t want the world to see. It’s like that old advice for sending credit card numbers by email: think of it like a postcard; you wouldn’t send your credit card number that way, so don’t do it by email. Think of photos on Facebook as the colourful side of that postcard. We can blame Mark Zuckerberg all we like for killing privacy, but the truth is all he’s doing is giving us the rope with which to hang it ourselves.