I think all this talk of privacy on "social networking" sites is ingenuous at best. You might as well post your profile on a physical bulletin board in the main hall at your high school - then expect the school to make sure that only people you trust look at it. The whole concept of places like Facebook and MySpace is the illusion that people whom you've never met are "friends" and "can be trusted". I say that you simply shouldn't put anything there that you don't want the world to see. It only becomes a matter of whether their security itself is effective if you're talking about truly private information, which you instruct them to only make available to a few individuals, whose identity YOU PERSONALLY know. In that case, I probably wouldn't trust their security to be as good as that provided by someone like, for instance, your bank or credit card company.
Much as they would like to PRETEND to the contrary, this is not like a school, where someone can actually stand at the door and check ID's - and stops the 42 year old guys whose drivers licenses say they're fifteen year old girls. It also isn't like your online banking, where they actually will verify who you are before allowing access to an account.
[They COULD do that, but they are not willing to.]
The information they COLLECT or CREATE is an entirely different matter. If, for example, they collect information about your buying trends and use that information to "provide" targeted ads to you, then it's simply a question of whether they use that information themselves or sell it to their vendors.... and how good the security at each location is......
The general guideline is simple - social networks are NOT designed for high-security..... you shouldn't EXPECT anything you post there or allow them to collect to remain private. Such expectations are ingenuous and unrealistic. These networks would LIKE children (and parents) to believe that they provide security and a "supervised environment", but the reality is that they do not (and CAN NOT) do so with the current models they use.
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