I recently deactivated my Facebook account.  Although it had been a handy tool for reconnecting with old friends, keeping up with some colleagues, and socializing with family & other loved ones, in the past few months, I began to experience a downside to the social networking site. This eventually led to the deactivation of my account. Although social networking can be a useful tool, I came to the conclusion that, for me, Facebook took things too far, to the point that it became too much work to maintain my account appropriately, I began to worry about my online reputation, and I began to feel that I lived in a self-created, all-too-public bubble with serious negative consequences on some important relationships.

The beginning of my concern over Facebook came when Facebook began making default settings on accounts so that everyone could have access to your postings. I was spending too much time making sure that what I wanted to stay private was in fact private or shared with only certain people, and that I didn’t see all the extraneous junk that I didn’t want to see from my friends. I admit that I enjoyed interaction with some of my friends over games like Mafia Wars, but I didn’t want my business colleagues to know that I was becoming increasingly respected in my online “crime family” — it’s not appropriate — and I didn’t think that anyone else truly cared. The privacy settings were time consuming and not always as easy to use as I thought they should be. Canada has even brought serious concerns to the social networking site—citing that Facebook does not comply with their national privacy laws because of the company’s policy of keeping your account information indefinitely (notice in the beginning I said I ‘deactivated’ and not ‘deleted’ my Facebook account).

The ACLU has also recently brought attention to Facebook and the lack of measures in place to protect users’ privacy. The organization has recently created a Facebook quiz with the sole intention of showing you the access that quiz creators have to your information when you or a friend takes part in one of the numerous, often silly, Facebook quizzes. The quiz emphasizes that Facebook has inadequate safeguards to ensure that any information collected is legitimately for and used only for the operation of the Facebook application. In other words, quiz developers can potentially take whatever information they want and do whatever they want with it. Perhaps most startling is that there is no kind of screening in place to even know or verify who the developers are. You can see the quiz questions and answers.

Setting your security settings to maximum and keeping a bare minimum profile may not be enough to protect your privacy on sites like Facebook.  MIT students were recently able to create pretty accurate software that could guess whether or not a man was gay based on basic profile information and friends lists—even if the man did not identify himself as gay on his Facebook page.  Another group was able to accurately guess social security numbers based on publicly available data and information such as birth date and birth place—both things which many people have on their Facebook profiles in the form of birthday and hometown. That’s enough to begin identity theft. This raises questions about what else can be gleaned from even basic social networking pages.

Beyond privacy issues, there are real potential relationship consequences from using Facebook—for both professional and personal relationships. A recent article on PC World warned of the digital tattoo that one leaves behind on social networking sites that could potentially be seen by the wrong person. Even if you think your social networking pages are totally private, remnants of this digital tattoo could potentially be found through search engine sites such as Google or Yahoo by potential employers, colleagues, family members or those without good intentions. It doesn’t take too much imagination to see how things you may have posted 10 years ago on the Internet or talked about some time ago on a social networking site could come back to haunt you in work or personal relationships now. If you’d like a bit of insight into your digital tattoo, go to Yasni.com and search for your name. It will give a tag cloud of terms and people associated to you as well as a list of links related to you—all just a click away from more information. My tag cloud included my colleagues on Leading Virtually as well as things related to Japan, where I lived 10 years ago, a bookstore I managed more than 5 years ago, a conference I attended earlier this year, and a few acquaintances that I haven’t been in contact with for almost a decade.

Another recent article in the Wall Street Journal accurately described perhaps the biggest potential problem with the extent that Facebook is being used in our lives today—the ruining of friendships and relationships. Some pitfalls contributed to the use of the medium in our important relationships include the feelings of jealousy or resentment when friends or colleagues tell us that they are too busy to write or call, yet they are updating their Facebook status every hour and obviously spending a lot of time on the site taking quizzes or “conversing” with others online. Other issues that can cause rifts in relationships is the posting of boring or inane information that one would never really announce in face-to-face interactions, seeing previously unknown sides of someone’s personality, and the boldness that comes from interacting online that might encourage someone to say something that they might not say face-to-face—all of which is taking place in a completely public forum and can lead to embarrassment, and of course, more of a digital tattoo.

Ultimately, I decided two things: 1) I need to invest time and care into the relationships – personal and professional – that are important to me.  I cannot rely on Facebook to be the basis of our communication if the relationship is to be a healthy, growing one. 2) It’s not necessarily wise to mingle personal and professional relationships. Before social networking sites, our circles of friends and colleagues were often very separate. Before I deactivated my account, I had a list of almost 200 “friends” from every facet of my life—my family, students, my advisor, friends from high school, former professors, former employers, my college roommate, and friends from other towns I had lived in. Each group serves a different purpose in my life and they aren’t necessarily meant to mingle. It lead to the feeling that suddenly all aspects of my life were colliding and open to people that maybe the door should be closed to sometimes for my protection and theirs.

I am not suggesting that the answer to protecting yourself and your relationships is to deactivate your Facebook or all your social networking accounts. That’s not really reasonable. However, as leaders, professionals, and friends, I advocate spending some time thinking about how we use social networking tools and to what end, as well as what the future consequences of our actions in the online social world could be. I’m sure I’ll return to Facebook eventually but with a strict set of personal guidelines for how I use the account.