I've long positioned myself at work as one of the resident experts on Facebook privacy. I am very committed to building strong skills for and awareness around digital citizenship, but truth be told being the resident expert on Facebook privacy has other benefits -- most notably justifying the amount of time I spend on the site.

Nevertheless, despite my efforts in helping my coworkers establish safe FB practices, I've been less than diligent on the home front with my 16-year-old.

In part, this is due to his longstanding preference for MySpace over Facebook. When he first joined MySpace, we had a long conversation about appropriate online behavior, particularly related to uploading images (He had a rather gory wreck on his bike and wanted to have his profile picture be of his bloody face. Niiiiiice. Not.). We talked about what to say, what to share, who to friend - the basic Intro to Online Communities parental speech. And I trust my kid; we have a solid relationship. He tells me things without my having to spy or pry. So I've let him have his MySpace world, and I've been happy in my Facebook one.

But lately he's been spending more time on Facebook (a reflection of the mass exodus from MySpace? Or a reflection that he's moving out of the age bracket that still prefers the site? Or that he's not in a band?). And I realized the other day that my very generic how to play it safe online talk needed to be rebroadcast, so to speak, and that I needed to walk him through the Ten Rules of Facebook presentation that I gave coworkers. (Credits to Lisa Sjogren for her terrific work on this topic.)

So I showed him how to establish some privacy settings so that certain family members (including, I realize, his mother) couldn't see everything he said and did. We talked about the implications of giving Facebook applications access to one's wall. I reminded him that what he posted online was part of a digital footprint that would follow him into the next part of his life - college, career (and I showed him how, despite my so-called expertise, I totally fail at that since a Google search for Audrey Watters returns a blog entry from here where I drop the F-bomb. Awesome, Mom. I know, huh.)

We ended our talk and he went off to fix his Facebook page (while I set off thinking about how to move that F-bomb post down further in the ol' search results). And with most parent-teen talks, I didn't really expect too radical a shift on his part. I mean, I hoped he'd continue to avoid posting stupid pictures and I hoped he'd stop taking stupid quizzes. But truthfully I figured he'd probably just un-friend a bunch of relatives and little more. But to my surprise, he said he'd adjusted what his profile reveals to the public! No longer is he on Facebook because he's interested in women.

And when you're the parent of a teen online, sometimes the little things like this are triumphs, ok? Because I think he might've listened (a little).

But what about Facebook? Do they listen? What are they doing vis-à-vis privacy and digital citizenship? And are they making my job as a parent easier or harder?

Announcing further adjustments to their governing documents today, Facebook has once again raised questions about whether or not the social networking giant is pushing us all to be more public with our data (in a move that is not akin to government and corporate transparency, in my opinion -- despite Facebook's use of those buzz words in the opening paragraph of the announcement -- but in a move that gives corporate and government and marketing forces default access into our identities, our purchases, our affinities, our lives).

Most troubling in today's announcement is their plan to grant trusted websites access to Facebook user data.

In order to provide you with useful social experiences off of Facebook, we occasionally need to provide General Information about you to pre-approved third party websites and applications that use Platform at the time you visit them (if you are still logged in to Facebook). Similarly, when one of your friends visits a pre-approved website or application, it will receive General Information about you so you and your friend can be connected on that website as well (if you also have an account with that website).

And once again, the stakes for building my son's skills and knowledge as a 21st century digital citizen (along with my own skills, my co-workers', my Facebook friends') have got a lot higher. It's no longer merely a matter of reminding Isaiah that it's probably not a good idea to answer quiz questions about his aunt that paint her in a rather unflattering light or a matter of reminding him that he might not want his granny to know what he thinks about her church or her politics -- it's a matter of helping him think critically and act responsibly in the face of what is now the major force in the construction and dissemination of his digital footprint. And notably, now it's not my son who's in charge. It's Facebook.