Your profile setting reads private, but your life reads open to the social network. 

Nowadays Facebook is one of the main sources of communication, especially for college students who are away from family and friends back home. 

We use it to keep in contact with social or school groups, to announce happy and sad experiences, and to express random thoughts throughout the day. 

When Facebook was first introduced to us, the website gave the option to set our profiles to private, meaning online activity was hidden from Facebook users who were not listed as our “friends.” 

That sense of privacy no longer exists on Facebook.

There are activities people should be wary of putting on Facebook because even when a profile is set to “private,” privacy is the last thing we’re given when it comes to our online presence. 

Some people may even want to think about not using Facebook at all.

What matters most to the company now is not how much is shared among friends, but how much you share with the social network, according to TIME. 

The more you share, the better it is for the people who work for Facebook.

This is wrong because when utilizers go on Facebook they do not wish to see a bunch of advertisements and see what businesses are up to, or at least I don’t.

We go on to update ourselves and our friends with what is happening in our lives, and we do it on Facebook because we were told it has privacy.

Facebook keeps track of every user’s activities and uses those activities to advertise businesses, which is how the company makes a profit.

The site’s terms of service also allows your image to be automatically used if you’ve pressed the “like” button on a particular product or checked into a store or restaurant, according to KING 5. 

However, you may not know the site also keeps track of every single search made on your profile, including Facebook’s graph search system that can expose past posts to everyone, according to the same article.

This means, for example, others can see a status with a picture that you liked even if they aren’t friends with the person who posted the picture.

This is why we often see posts that have been liked by our friends, and these posts can be pictures of people we’ve never met. 

This serves as a small yet important reminder that when you post a picture on Facebook, the audience stretches far beyond those on your friends list.

Another interesting but not so private fact about Facebook is its use of what the company calls “self-censorship.” 

When you’re thinking about what to write on your status or how to respond to a friend’s post, and then change your mind and delete the text, Facebook still records and keeps track of those self-censored texts, according to an article from Future Tense, a website in partnership with Slate that specializes in new emerging technologies and its policies. 

Facebook analyzes these thoughts we have chosen not to share through codes on the browser. 

The real question is where do these self-censored thoughts go and who is reading them? 

The code automatically analyzes what has been typed into any text box and reports metadata back to Facebook, also according to Future Tense. 

Facebook believes the self-censorship is a type of interaction covered by the policy.

If the key purpose of deleting a comment is to have it not be a part of the interaction we are partaking in, what type of interaction could Facebook possibly mean?

Technology is changing every day, and as constant utilizers we need to remember that everything and anything displayed on the Internet can and usually will be recorded and saved. 

Facebook may not be the best source of communication anymore. People might want to consider sticking to text messages for conversations and Instagram to share pictures.

It does not matter if sites are set to private because any type of information can be leaked. The status you thought was so clever at the age of 20 might not be so funny when your boss finds it.

– Marissa Mararac is a junior communication major from Tacoma. She can be contacted at 335-2290 or by [email protected]. The opinions expressed in this column are not necessarily those of the staff of The Daily Evergreen or those of Student Publications.