> I think the point of a social network is to stay connected to people with whom you are comfortable being yourself.

The problem is that people you barely know add you, and if you reject the friend request you're indeterminately labeled as an asshole. This has happened to me several times to an extent where I was called out on it in person. My rule of thumb was that I don't add people from whom I wouldn't appreciate a call at 3am.

I had to break this because apparently the fact that it says "friend" doesn't repel people who I haven't seen in years. SO right now I'm using lists and I've put tons of people in 'restricted' but still, this mentality is annoying as hell.

Regarding family: I'm friends with my grandmother and I hate it. She doesn't understand most of the stuff that I post about but she still comments stupid things on my posts and pictures. Well now she's on restricted but if she'd ever found out I'd be in trouble.

I can't imagine wanting to be in the company of someone who who (a) you don't want on your facebook, and (b) would bitch at you for it.

Off-hand the following categories occur to me: co-workers, classmates, random people at user groups you attend (or any other club-like group), family members. In all these cases, you don't have control over the complete set of people you interact with, so "wanting to be in the company" of them is not relevant.

You're correct. Just because I've worked with someone it doesn't mean that I want to hear anything from them. Or talk to them.

I'm much more restrictive about who I spend my face time with than who I'll accept a FB invite from.

I guess the biggest problem is that Facebook is now the place where everything comes together. You suddenly end up having your boss, parents, coworkers as friend along with the guy you used to do drugs with during your teen years and that trashy ex-girlfriend. And it's not easy to keep those things apart with the real name policy facebook has. It's also not easy to reject a lot of friend requests. Sure somebody you haven't seen in ages you can easily ignore but with coworkers it can get unpleasant. I'm glad that my parents are too old for facebook but for a lot of especially young people rejecting a parents' friend request is probably impossible as well.

Sure you can try to have different profiles. But they easily spill over. And facebook collects a lot of data. The worst thing are probably the phone and address books of your friends. Someone has stored your email address or phone number associated with your real name on his phone and installs the facebook app and suddenly they now. Or people are stupid enough to give facebook access to their email account. They even started to ask friends of you what your real name is.

I recently had to delete my account because they realised I was using a fake name. I don't know if somebody "squealed on me" or they got the information elsewhere.

In the past your online identities were easily separated because everything was in a different place and it was easier to be anonymous. You could have several IM profiles for friends and family separated. With other people you'd only communicate through one of your many email addresses.

If you read back to a few other posts about Facebook and parents, there were a lot of "Your parent is your friend or it's banned" posts.

> Whilst I find this whole privacy setting issue unpleasant and frustrating, I am continually amazed that people would be Facebook friends with parents and relatives - from whom they would prefer to keep things hidden.

> I would not let my parents sit in the room whilst I chatted with friends, or listen in on phone calls. I would not let them go through the photos on my phone, nor those of me on the phones of friends.

Same with most people. Most people have different personas for different groups--they have their family persona that they present to their parents and other relatives, their casual friend persona they present to most of their friends, their intimate persona they present to close friends and lovers, their work persona for co-workers, and often others.

Facebook has purposefully decided to ignore that, and insist that you have a single Facebook persona. That gives you a couple poor choices for how to use Facebook. You can pick one of your personas and make that your Facebook persona, and do not "friend" anyone with it who does not belong with that persona. This is hard to explain to those groups that you use the other personas with.

Or you can try to use Facebook's poorly designed, poorly implemented, poorly documented, frequently changing, and laughably inadequate privacy controls to try to beat their "one size fits all" persona approach into something approximating the reality of any normal person's life--and if you ever trip up, you have a good risk of blowing up some aspect of your life.