Comment Re:FB has been quite liberal with users' privacy (Score 3, Insightful) 193
I have a FB account. I have reestablished contact with old friends and very distant family members I didn't otherwise have contact with. The alternative to finding someone you have lost contact with (if your other close family and friends don't know where someone is or how to contact them) is by searching Google and hoping you find a reasonable match. Even then most sites that find a person for you want an idiotic amount of money and a buy in to their scam service to get the contact info. Then there isn't a guarantee that it is the right person or the contact info is still relevant.
People do use FB for more than asking someone to fertilize their crops or signing some mob-mentality world solving petition. It's possible to use social networking in a responsible manner. Facebook does seem to have a blatant disregard for their users and it's possible that a better service will come along and people will move to it. Another point condescending pedants might be missing is the exposure of security and privacy risks can help to educate people who might not otherwise even know about them. That is, just because people aren't using social networking doesn't make them any more safe on the internet. There were plenty of online scams and security risks before social networking; at least now people can communicate the nature of them and educate users how to safeguard themselves. One of the first things I did after seeing that CBS news story is post it on FB so that people could change their FB and email password info.