In 2006, my high school made national news when it suspended twenty students after finding pictures of them drinking on Facebook. It was the first time that my classmates and I realized the potential dangers of indiscriminately publishing our lives online. Clearly, we were naive. Similar leaks occur today with such frequency that they no longer surprise anyone, and for the most part, it's our own fault. We alone are responsible for the information we share about ourselves online, but the sites that facilitate this sharing contribute to these problems. Advertisements benefit from information we provide and, as a result, Facebook encourages us to be forthcoming. This makes it difficult to protect what we post. Facebook creates an environment where completely controlling our identities online is impossible, and as the site grows, so does its potential to infringe upon privacy.

Rather than serving as what we hide, privacy is our ability to consciously and selectively reveal ourselves. Privacy is what allows us to control exactly what information we want to present to the world. It is not the same in every context, and this is where Facebook's model fails.

Facebook experiences persistent criticism over its treatment of users' privacy. This summer, there was a public outcry that forced the company to simplify their site's incomprehensible array of privacy controls. Unfortunately, while this reform does allow users to manage their settings more easily, users still lack complete control over how their information is shared or used. According to Facebook's current privacy policy (now longer than the US Constitution), some data like names and profile pictures are shared with everyone, and no setting can hide them. Even more disturbing, users' profiles, photos, wall posts, and friend lists are now also accessible to the rest of the Internet by default. Facebook has slowly updated its handling of privacy to the point where almost everything is shared by default.

Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook's founder, has consistently argued that society is moving in the direction of more shared information, more openness, and that Facebook's perpetually lengthening privacy policy merely reflects these evolving social norms. There are a couple of problems with his thinking. First, Facebook's behavior toward privacy is normalizing, not simply representative. As Facebook treats more and more information as public by default, people lower their expectations for privacy. Second, given the complexity of managing privacy online, people are not aware of how much information they actually reveal about themselves.

In a recent interview in the Facebook Effect by David Kirkpatrick, Mr. Zuckerberg said "You have one identity - the days of you having a different image for your work friends or co-workers and for the other people you know are probably coming to an end pretty quickly... Having two identities for yourself is an example of lack of integrity" (199). His remarks describe how Facebook treats its users, but in the real world we do maintain multiple identities, generally without sacrificing our integrity in the process. Depending on the context, we present ourselves differently. Most of us do not conduct ourselves the same way in a classroom as we would with friends in a bar, or list our Thanksgiving plans on our resumes. Facebook, however, refuses to grasp these distinctions and instead dumps all our interactions and self-presentation on the site into a single bucket of "Friends." The rudimentary controls in Facebook to selectively present ourselves have been chipped away with every revision, and given Mr. Zuckerberg's vision, it seems likely that Facebook will only push its users toward more openness and less privacy.

These criticisms may be answered by keeping a close eye on the site's privacy controls- but what about the one entity that no setting can block? No matter how securely a user hides their account from others, the Facebook company holds and has access to all the information stored on it which it uses to sell space for targeted advertisements to other companies. The site's home page prominently proclaims that "Facebook is free, and always will be," but in reality users pay the company every time they list a new favorite band on their profile or click the "Like" button on a blog post.

Facebook's vast amounts of aggregated data only become more valuable as users freely provide the company with increasingly detailed pictures of their interests and buying habits. Allowing users to better manage their privacy and identities online would only hinder the ability of advertisers to reach them. Thus, Mr. Zuckerberg's statements about social norms are selfishly stated: more sharing means more profits.