Facebook, myspace and other social networking sites - whatever happened to Privacy?

I've been slow to adopt Facebook. Perhaps I'm a luddite. Perhaps I'm too paraniod.

There's an article titled Facebook users open to cyber attacks, ID theft? on News.com which discusses many of my concerns.

Rick Howard (Director of intelligence at VeriSign's iDefense Labs) was quoted as saying "They seem to have no sense of privacy" and "a longer-term problem is users' openness with personal information on public forums".

As Rick states, the issue isn't Facebook per se, it's common with most social networking sites. People seem quite happy to share all kinds of personal information with their "friends" even though they have no way of authenticating the true identity of those that have access.

A malicious individual can easily find out the information they need to commit Identity Theft by taking advantage of the proliferation of personal information that's available through social networks.

There are many things I like about social networks and Facebook specifically including being reminded of upcoming birthdays, seeing which groups friends join thereby finding ones that are likely to be of interest to me.