When I signed onto my Facebook last week, I was very excited!! Of course I had neglected to read the letter from Facebook’s CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, but that didn’t really matter because apparently even he did not understand the implications.

At first it appears that you have greater control over what content is shared with the Web, however, upon greater inspection it is clear that now things like your status and links are shared WITH EVERYONE ON THE WEB!!! This makes monitoring your own words so much more important (as I highly doubt potential employers will like seeing “I F$?%?! hate my job” as your status). Additionally, with all these “facebook connect” sites, your information is being spread throughout the Web– and most times you don’t even realize it’s happening. Sites include DIGG, UrbanSpoon, and several other social networking and link sharing sites.

This may not matter very much for you– a 20-something using Facebook to stay connected to family and friends, but it does have a greater impact on Celebrities and who knows, maybe you’ll be a VIP someday, so you should pay attention to this too.

According to Gawker, Facebook’s new “privacy” settings, which have in reality opened up Facebook to more eyes, allow you to find celebrities and also to see who their friends are– Angelina Jolie for example has 27 friends, who are all on the A-List. Their profiles show up as normal pages– like your or mine–with the information you or I would allow to be shown, including who your friends are. This is taking Face-stalking to a whole different level.

What do you think about the policies? Initially, like I said I thought they were good, but now I see they may be very, very bad indeed.

As you enjoy the holiday think about this– make sure you are especially careful with New Years Eve pictures, because I know I don’t want any photos haunting me any time soon!