This is a very quick post. Just seen the following status update posted by a very close friend of mine:

Warning -any person and/or institution and/or Agent and/or Agency of any governmental structure including but not limited to the United States Federal Government also using or monitoring/using this website or any of its associated websites, you do NOT have my permission to utilize any of my profile information nor any of the content contained herein including, but not limited to my photos, and/or the comments made about my photos or any other “picture” art posted on my profile. You are hereby notified that you are strictly prohibited from disclosing, copying, distributing, disseminating, or taking any other action against me with regard to this profile and the contents herein. The foregoing prohibitions also apply to your employee, agent, student or any personnel under your direction or control the contents of this profile are private and legally privileged and confidential information, and the violation of my personal privacy is punishable by law. UCC 1-103 1-308 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED WITHOUT PREJUDICE

For those of you who do not understand the reasoning behind this posting, Facebook is now a publicly traded entity. Unless you state otherwise, anyone can infringe on your right to privacy once you post to this site. It is recommended that you and other members post a similar notice as this, or you may copy and paste this version. If you do not post such a statement once, then you are indirectly allowing public use of items such as your photos and the information contained

Just wanted to make some clarifications before this goes mental on people’s feeds again.

This misguided post is actually an old one making the rounds back in June and was aptly dealt with on this post on Mashable titled “Viral Privacy Notice on Facebook Is Fake“.

Key thing to note is that just because Facebook is a publicly traded company, it does not have any affect on how it treats your data and privacy. From a general users perspective, it only means that you can now buy shares of the company on the stock market. That’s pretty much it.

This was Facebook’s response when I got in touch with them about this notice:

In terms of ownership of data we are clear in our terms and conditions that users own all their data and that you have the ability to control what you share with who via your privacy settings:

https://www.facebook.com/policies/#!/legal/terms – You own all of the content and information you post on Facebook, and you can control how it is shared through your privacy and application settings.