This dates me a bit, but back when I started school at Iowa State, Facebook was one of the cool benefits of college you could only access with a university e-mail address.

So, a few weeks after I got my ISU username all set up, I logged on to see what all the fuss was about. I wasn’t sure I knew anyone else on Facebook yet, but I found some interesting groups like Ames Iowa Needs an Olive Garden to join for starters. Yes, Facebook has come a long way since then, but has all that progress been good or has Facebook opened our personal lives to the world?

What information have you loaded onto Facebook’s servers during the years? Your friends of course, as well as your age, gender, job history, daily status updates and pictures?

While other major companies like Google and Apple also have software built into their websites to collect data about us and our lives, Facebook has something better than just dumb software, they have millions of users willing to input their own data into Facebook’s database.

And while you may not realize it, all that data is worth a staggering amount of money to Facebook. Not only that, but they have a history of trying again and again to share more data about you by creating new services set by default to be viewable by the general public.

Even if you are diligent about watching your account privacy settings and only share your information with your closest friends, that doesn’t mean Facebook will want to be so protective of your information.

Earlier this year they got in trouble for sharing individual user data with advertisers, allowing advertisers to track your movements online with a huge amount of precision.

Since then they have stopped that practice, but they still are feeding you precisely targeted ads from advertisers based on the amount of information they have about you.

If you don’t realize how targeted their ads are, I encourage you to go pretend to make your own ad sometime — facebook.com/ads — just to see the ad system. Advertisers can target your city, age group, gender, interests, relationship status, education and companies you have worked for. While they may not know exactly who you are, they do know with a large amount of certainty that you are a member of their target group of customers.

The amount of data Facebook holds is pretty scary, and with their newest foray into location-based social networking with Facebook Places Check-in, they, and your friends, can use your phone to track your movements even when you are away from your home computer.

Now, this is a neat feature for many reasons, but I hope you don’t have some kind of stalker among your Facebook friends. Also, what if a hacker got ahold of Facebook’s databases or someone stole hardware from Facebook with your data on it? Would they know too much about you?

Now, it would be great to get away from Facebook to a social network that doesn’t try at every turn to sell my personal data or would carefully protect my data from everyone but my closest friends. But what other network is out there?

Myspace? Orkut? Friendster?

Probably my favorite possible alternative is Diaspora, a yet-to-be-released alternative to Facebook made by four New York University students during the summer that they plan to release publicly in a few months — Diaspora means a dispersion of people from their native land.

Diaspora defeats the massive power wielded by Facebook by allowing all users to host their own data on their own virtual server rather than a central location. While this will likely make it slower to access other users’ profiles, it will let users carefully control the spread of their user data.

Until Diaspora is ready, we’ll just have to keep carefully regulating our data on Facebook with custom privacy settings. But I’ll be patiently waiting for the release date of Diaspora with the hope I can eventually move my social network away from Facebook and control my data on my own computer, even though I may have given away all my data to Facebook already.

Go to iowastatedaily.net for links to more articles about how to stay safe on Facebook.