Would you want your employer seeing this? (Click for larger.)

Do you smoke weed? Does God exist? How do you feel about fat people?

And most importantly, how do you feel about your family members, potential employers and the entire world, for that matter, having access to your answers to these questions?

Last month, the planet’s largest social-networking site launched “Facebook Questions,” a tool that allows users to post questions and answers as easily as a status message. The feature is advertised to users as a way to “get answers from the people [they] trust.” Notably, access to this data gives companies an incentive to advertise via the site, which in turn is fiscally beneficial to CEO Mark Zuckerberg and crew.

The problem is that unlike every other feature Facebook has rolled out, this one comes with no privacy settings. And why would it? Your answers mean nothing to companies if you won’t share them.

According to the FAQ:

As with other Facebook applications like Photos and Events, there is no way to turn off Questions. … You should only ask and answer questions that you are comfortable sharing with everyone on Facebook as the questions you have participated in are visible to everyone.

So, that’s it. Your cousin asks you, “What do you think about those gosh-darn hippie vegans?” and you jokingly respond with an answer that, if acted out, would land you in prison. Soon, the world will know what a jerk you are. There goes that amazing job you applied for—and that second date with the cute girl who thought you were just so sweet and sensitive.

But don’t rush to delete your Facebook account just yet. There is one solution that might not save you from Google Cached for awhile, but it will clean up your profile and make you the presentable Mr. Charming you once were. From the FAQ;

You cannot edit the text of your questions or posts, but you can delete any of your questions or posts as follows:

If you have asked a question:

• To delete your question, go to the question box and click the “Delete” button which is located in the lower right of the box.
• To delete question options that people voted on, go to the question box and click the “Edit options” button which is located in the lower right of the box. Then, you can delete individual options by clicking the X beside them. Please note that deleting a question option will also delete any associated votes for that option.

If you have provided an answer:

• To delete a post you provided as an answer, go to the question box and find your post within the “Posts” section. Then, click the X to the upper right of your post to remove it.
• To remove your vote from a poll, go to the question box and click the “Unvote” button which is located in the lower right of the box. If you voted for multiple options, just uncheck each of your votes to remove them.

The lesson: There is no such thing as privacy on the internet. If you wouldn’t want your grandmother to see it, you’re better off just not posting it.

Facebook product manager Sam Odio announced this week that his team is testing face-detection technology on photographs uploaded to the site. It’s not as Big-Brother as it sounds–at least not yet. The feature is simply designed to streamline the photo-tagging process, which allows users to link images of friends and family to their own Facebook accounts.

If you own a newer digital camera, you’ve probably noticed that it displays a little square over your subject on the view screen as the lens brings the subject into focus. If there are people in your shot, the camera will try to find their faces so that you can get a clear image of your friends rather than, say, the table in front of them.

Image courtesy Facebook

The technology works similarly on Facebook, except it’s designed to help you label photos you’ve already taken. It cuts out a lot of tedious and time-consuming clicking on the users’ part by determining for them if an object in a given photo is a human face. It then pops up a little box where the user can simply type an auto-detected person’s name. If you don’t yet have access to the new functionality, here’s what it looks like (at right).

It’s only a matter of time before developers refine the facial-recognition algorithms to detect and tag friends’ faces for you. And from there, who knows what this could mean for the continuing battle between privacy advocates and those in favor of information sharing on the internet?

I’m not a big proponent for either side of the debate. Sure, I want my privacy, and I want owners of the sites I use to be honest and forthright about what they plan to do with my information, but I also don’t have a whole lot to hide. I obey the law, I don’t go to wild parties, and my life, in general, is kind of boring. Additionally, I’m a realist: If I don’t want people outside of the Web to know my deepest, most personal thoughts, then I won’t share them online either.

Even still, I have to admit it’s all kind of creepy. I mean, why did Facebook have to advertise wedding-related products and services when I was engaged and then, as soon as I changed my relationship status to “married,” why’d they have to start advertising baby stuff?

I felt pressure from Facebook to start having kids before my own mother even started on about it!

But, I digress.

We all know that Facebook already advertises products to us based on our interests, age, gender, relationship status, and so forth. Yet one wonders what else they’ll do with it, particularly now that developers are slaloming down the slippery slope of tagging us with information we might not want to share, potentially by recognizing who we really are versus whom we might claim to be.

Facial-recognition technology already exists and has a number of applications. The FBI has used it to find bad guys, and now American police officers are doing the same. According to various recent reports including this one from The Daily Mail, any officer with a smartphone could feasibly fight crime through photography:

Police in the US are using an iPhone app to take photos of suspects and instantly compares them with a criminal database.

The app employs biometric information such as facial recognition software to help police identify suspects within seconds.

Known as MORIS (Mobile Offender Recognition and Identification System), the system lets police officers take a photo of a suspect, upload it into a secure network where it is then analysed.

Maureen Boyle of The Enterprise newspaper in Brockton, MA, produced the following video about the iPhone app for the paper’s YouTube page:

Back to social networking: If you’re a criminal and you’re dumb enough to put pictures of yourself on Facebook, you deserve to get caught. But what about those of us who are innocent? Should the authorities be able to comb through our information just because they can? Intellectually, I’m inclined to say “yes” because I’ve got nothing to hide, and I’m all for chasing bad guys. But part of me wonders how this is any different from illegal wiretapping or spying. Something just doesn’t feel right.

What do you think?