Commenting with your Facebook IDThis is not the typical article where you’re warned by your IT guy about things you shouldn’t do while browsing on the internet. More often than not, a piece of advice from your in-house IT guy is mainly geared toward keeping your workstation safe.

He doesn’t want your online activities to open some backdoor for viruses and Trojan horses. Why is that? In fact, if your company’s workstation is infected, or has been hacked, the in-house IT guy will have hard times mitigating the collateral damages which includes: loss of your data (let’s hope you had a good and tested data backup procedure applied), network congestion (a pirated computer usually uses so much network traffic that it is a good practice to disconnect it immediately so as to keep the other users in a satisfying working environment).

Why commenting with your Facebook ID is a bad idea?

Those are all about your data and eventually your computer, but what about your online privacy when commenting on blogs and forums with your Facebook ID?

Ok,  this one goes against all the trends. You may have noticed that most of the popular (and not-so-popular) websites and blogs allow you to comment by using your Facebook credentials. From first approach, commenting via your Facebook account seems to be a very good option: you don’t have to register anymore on this site (which means, no more new credentials and password to remember)- but this also means that you are allowing this website to access other information about you that you have published on Facebook.

This may not seem obvious but, often, when it’s the first time that you comment on a website from your Facebook account, it is asking you a weird question that usually reads as “allow website XXX to do some things and access some data from your Facebook profiles.” I don’t know about you, but although I think it’s right from the application developers to warn me (or inform me) about the things such website can do on my Facebook profile, I’m never sure to what extent that website can access the info I have on Facebook. And I am sure; you don’t have any clue about it too.

And that’s my point …

Most of the people publish a lot of things about them on Facebook, and I am still convinced that Facebook can’t be trusted when it comes to privacy settings. As they are applying some changes to their security settings, users are lost. I just gave up adjusting my Facebook privacy settings and consider that anything I publish on it is considered public.

So let’s get back to the issue on commenting with your Facebook ID: the pre-Facebook commenting systems only needed a pseudo, an e-mail address and eventually a website address to “give you a face.” It has then evolved to some gravatars (e-mails associated with a picture). Up to there: everything was fine. Most people gave fake names and e-mail addresses – and no one cares about who’s behind that pseudo.

Now with Facebook commenting, not only do you provide your Facebook account, but you are also giving away a lot of information about you and your friends. And, from my point of view, this means the following: by commenting on such site, not only do you voice your opinion on the comment section, but you are also giving away a lot of information about you than the usual e-mail address and pseudo.

What do you think about commenting with your Facebook ID? Do you think I’m paranoiac? Voice your ideas in the comment system.