[Annette]

As a social networking site, I think it does a great job of controlling spam and protecting privacy. I don't interpret their terms of use as meaning they sell my private information to outside parties. My understanding is they collect the personal information I provide (and I can provide as much or as little as I choose) to help people find me.

They also collect statistical data to help people and businesses network. As a potential advertiser on Facebook, I can select a target group from their entire audience who will see my ad. For example, they can target my ad to females between ages 18 and 24 who live in Brazil. This is more meaningful and economical than paying to have my banner ad displayed to every person who visits a particular website. I take the quote from their terms to mean that the type of information they share is a gathering of statistics about their users - the same type of statistics collected by virtually every commercial website out there magnified by 100, of course, because most users provide much more personal information than on a typical forum such as this.

For example, we know how many people visiting our store are using which internet browsers. We couldn't say that visitor x uses browser c, but we can say what percentage of our visitors use browser c. Now, if we used those statistics for profit by selling outside advertising on our store's website, we would have to tell you that we were distributing that information. Facebook, on the other hand, knows how many of their users claim being Christian, or Republican, or a college graduates. Pretty powerful information in the world of advertising. I may be wrong, and I've been wrong before, but I think that's all I am agreeing to by using their site.

I'm not an avid advocate of Facebook, but I do think it has merit. Of course, if you're not into the idea of social networking online, then Facebook will have no value to you. But as such website's go, I think they're one of the safer sites as compared to, say, MySpace.