It feels like privacy was something of a semi-sacred concept until not too long ago. But over the course of the past few years, there seems to be a shift in how much of their privacy people are willing to give up. Social media has played a large part in that, and to some, Facebook seems to be one of the leading forces. I think there are 2 factors that play into this:

1. The pressure to participate in social media continues to grow, and

2. The technical complexities of using the networks are outpacing people's ability to comprehend the impact of participation in the networks on their privacy.

In this article, Sarah Perez talks about some recent announcements by Facebook and their impact on privacy. Her suggestion: you may want to turn off some of those applications that are snooping around your account without you even knowing. In case you're wondering what Facebook's official stand is on privacy, here's what founder Mark Zuckerberg said 2 years ago about privacy:

"That's the vector around which Facebook operates."

Here's what he said in January of this year:

"Doing a privacy change for 350 million users is not the kind of thing that a lot of companies would do.

But we viewed that as a really important thing, to always keep a beginner's mind and what would we do if we were starting the company now and we decided that these would be the social norms now and we just went for it."

So, don't take for granted that what you post online as private will stay that way for long. At the speed that ideas evolve online, privacy may soon be thought of as an antiquated notion.