While Facebook chairman and chief executive Mark Zuckerberg was boasting to Congress on Tuesday and Wednesday about how much his network is doing to protect privacy for its billions of users, I set up a new account to test what he was saying.
I wish the result had come as a surprise.
Instead, here’s everything that was public or turned on by default: My friends list. My profile, which could be indexed by search engines. I could be tagged in any post, even if I hadn’t reviewed it first. The site would suggest that my friends tag me in images. Ad targeting would let Facebook sell marketers the ability to find me based on my relationship status, employer, job title, education and interests. And Facebook would use my app and browser activity to decide which ads to show me.
Those were just a few of the settings I allowed automatically by clicking “Create Account.” It could have been a lot worse, too: Instead of “public,” many defaults, such as who could see future posts or who could see posts I’m tagged in, were set to “friends.”
