Concerns about online privacy and limits to data sharing have dominated the social media waves over last few weeks. First Zuckerman blazed away with Open Graph, relegating any concerns  about privacy to something very old fashioned. He then made a quick U turn and promised to simplify privacy settings on Facebook  (whose security settings are not less daunting than setting the winking clock on a old VCR -if you are old enough to remember).

Then the shoe dropped loudly with a research report from PEW  Internet revealing than 71% of youngsters (ages 18-29) have changed the privacy settings to limit sharing information about themselves. 47% of this age group removed unwanted comments from others from their sites and 41%  turned to anonymity by removing their names from photos/tagged photos.

Quite the opposite to being social!

This undercurrent has been simmering for some time. Previous surveys conducted by CareerBuilder and Microsoft have established that young job seekers were being rejected because of content on their Facebook pages or online photo albums. In fact college grads have been creating profiles with incomplete names or fake alias just to escape the unwarranted  attention from Recruitment Managers or overzealous Admission Officers. (See the blog post on Hiring in a social world…)
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According to statistics published by Facebook, the social networking site has 300 Million active users and an average user has 130 friends.

Last year Newsweek carried an article (by Steven Levy ) that the average number of friends in Myspace was 180 (May 2008).

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