This video is doing the rounds at the moment, making fun of the privacy aspects of Facebook:

Personally, I’m not a privacy nut and I don’t think Facebook is evil. But let me toss out this idea: Facebook is the biggest reputation system the world has ever seen. Forget about eBay, its reputation system only tracks your behaviour in online auctions. Facebook tracks your behaviour in the real world and reveals it for all (or at least all who you care about) to see. Of course, Facebook itself isn’t tracking you, but your friends are, and they’re publishing that information. Put unkindly, Facebook is a platform that enables a user-generated big brother.*

One interesting thing is how this will affect people’s behaviour. As the video points out, Facebook links your stupid behaviour at that party to future things, like potential girlfriends. This raises the cost of stupidity and thus people will behave less stupidly (I am assuming that the decision to behave stupidly or not is a rational one of comparing costs and benefits …). Anyway, social networking websites encourage conformity and punish bad behaviour — the crowdsourced morality police.

Another interesting thing is that you can use Facebook to commit yourself to good behaviour. Suppose you want to behave well but can’t trust yourself not to have one too many drinks and do something stupid at a party. The solution is simple, surround yourself with lots of Facebook friends and arm them with digital cameras …

* I know, I’m being unfair, Facebook has pretty sophisticated privacy settings that let you finely control your information. I’m over-dramatising to make a point.