<begin rant> I got an involuntary and unannounced reduction in my Facebook privacy yesterday.  No warning in email.  I visited my profile this morning, and was informed that “The things you care about will now link to actual pages.”  So, Facebook is mining my personal information to make connections I didn’t ask for.

Now all your Interests, etc., have been automatically linked to other pages, presumably to connect you with others having the same interests, and to provide you with more unsolicited information Facebook thinks you might like.  Wikipedia is offered as a sample source of such quality (ahem) information Facebook will thrust upon you.

Facebook presents what it’s already connected you to, and provides the option to opt-out.  But read the fine print - “If you don’t link to any Pages, these sections of your profile will be empty.  By linking your profile to Pages, you will be making public connections.”

At the end of this post, I walk through several privacy screens to show where lots of these not-so-easy-to-find Privacy Settings are located.

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I’m writing this post in Word because I can’t access my blog. It was hacked this weekend to provide you dear readers with low cost designer shoes and a delightful Trojan virus thrown in for free.

It appears the Wordpress and Network Solutions combo had a design flaw, and Network Solutions sent step-by-step instructions to recover (most) of our content. Like a good engineer (ahem) I followed the directions carefully. Didn’t work. But according to Network Solutions tech support, I am a special case. (Oh, the irony.) Alex expedited my request and then Elmer prioritized my case and now I’ll receive help in 1-3 business days. Grrr.

Thing is, I dug around on the server and found some strange goings-on with my blog files. I think the current account hack fix upset the carefully balanced apple cart Network Solutions built during my last trouble ticket mess.

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