On Monday night I was at a discussion on social media privacy called Like Me, Love My Data, a Mashup* event at the BCS.

The debate covered the issues Facebook is currently facing with Like and OpenGraph. This has already been thoroughly covered in the media and online, and the event itself was written about in blogs, on Twitter and even on Channel 4 news (pictured above).  I don’t have anything too constructive to add to the conversion beyond what everyone is already saying, but I thought I’d share a couple of conclusions from the debate that I found interesting.

The panellists were Raffi Krikorian, the tech lead Twitterapi, who joined through Skype, Ben Cohen, technology correspondent at Channel 4 News, technologist Sam Sethi and Iskandar Najmuddin, Technical Director at Nudge.

Things that stuck with me include:

• In response to a question on the event Twitter Fall, the panellists concluded that the difference between a site like Digg or Twitter, where we happily share information, and Facebook is that Facebook is our real world network, our actual social graph. We also began as a closed community that is striving to become public, but we still have the expectation that it is closed.
• Ben pointed out that especially for young people who have grown up with Facebook, by not joining the site they exclude themselves from their real life social networks.
• With so many controversial changes to the site, from Beacon in 2007, the privacy setting changes at the end of last year and more recently with Like and the OpenGraph API, even if people adjust their privacy settings to protect themselves after a change, there is no telling when Facebook will change again.
• If you visit a site external to Facebook while still logged in to Facebook and that site has a Like button, then apparently Facebook knows you visited the site and collects that data. Perhaps not too menacing, but Facebook has yet to announce what it plans to do with the information. Is paranoia about this unfounded, or is there cause for concern?
• One of the audience members proclaimed that “if you are happy to have your life shared on Facebook then, my friend, you haven’t lived!”
• What I found most interesting was that despite being with a group of privacy conscious and tech savvy people, in a quick survey of the room no one was alarmed enough by Facebook’s privacy issues to take action and delete their accounts. I have been flirting with the idea myself, and making preparations, but come May 31^st, will there be a surge of people deleting Facebook for good?