...in which we debate if people who can't read should bother with the Internet.

There is not a real big lot of shocking new info here, but the folks over at news.com have published a big expose on the way Facebook works, so I guess I will just comment on it over here. Click on through for the whole story, or stay here and skim through what I picked up when I skimmed through their article.

1. You sign up for Facebook, and in the process agree to give Faceboook full rights to whatever info you enter there.
2. You add an application, and Facebooks asks you if it is ok for the application to access your information. The application must have access to your profile in order for you to add it. This includes access to everything you have entered on your profile. All of it.
3. The application takes all your information over to their servers. That's what it means when Facebook tells you that the app was not written by Facebook.
4. The developers of the application delete your information when they are done with it, just like they promised Facebook they would.

Now folks, this is pretty much how the Internet works. Sure, there are different levels of privacy. This very weblog is an example of zero privacy. Anything written here will be crawled, cached, parsed, and archived for years to come. Sensitive data such as credit card numbers is kept much more closely. Facebook is somewhere in between in that it only releases the data to certain parties. Just as it said it would.