The good and bad of Facebook: Protect your privacy while tapping into the local community

The backlash over Facebook’s privacy concerns continues. The company had an FTC complaint filed against it recently; NYU students are developing an alternative Facebook, and some FB users are deactivating their accounts.

Others (including me) are removing all but the most basic information from their profiles and choosing the most restrictive privacy settings.

Many of Facebook’s privacy settings are obvious, but a couple are easy to overlook: the “instant personalization pilot program” (uncheck the box at the bottom to opt out) and what your friends can share about you (I’ve unchecked all of the boxes on this page). Finally, if you need to, you can block certain people from interacting with you on Facebook.

This two-minute video on Huffington Post runs through some of the most important privacy settings and how to change them.

Despite the privacy concerns, Facebook’s sheer size makes it almost impossible to ignore. With hundreds of millions of active users, it’s considered the place to find and build communities online.

Journalists who don’t wish to use Facebook to share personal details still can – and should – tap into the site to seek out sources and share information.

Mashable.com: Click on image to see full infographic of Facebook statistics

Facebook groups and pages have hundreds, and in some cases thousands, of fans. South Florida examples include:

* Testing Is Not Teaching (11,400 fans): A Palm Beach County group opposed to standardized testing. Post education reporters Cara Fitzpatrick and Kevin D. Thompson have posted queries, found sources and picked up story ideas here.

* Keep Mr. Miller at Dreyfoos School of the Arts! (1,111 fans): Another Facebook group that helped Kevin with his story about the West Palm Beach school’s beloved band director.

* Dress for Success of the Palm Beaches (554 fans): The group recently posted Willie Howard’s story about the organization on its wall to publicly thank him for his coverage.

* Downtown Lake Worth Events (1,500 fans)

* We Need Answers To The Acreage Cancer Cluster (870 fans)

* Clematis Street (Downtown West Palm Beach) (7,600 fans)

* Boca Raton police department (538 fans): The department uses its Facebook page to send press releases and post mug shots of suspects, such as the recent fatal crash on I-95.

* West Palm Beach Police Department (578 fans)

* You KNOW you go to Lake Worth High when…..??? (923 fans)

This is just a random sampling of a few local Facebook groups. The point is, any interest you can think of, a Facebook group can be – and probably has been – created for it. (BTW, it was a Facebook campaign that culminated in Betty White’s “Saturday Night Live” hosting gig.)

On a national level but with local interest: A Facebook page launched by the joint U.S. and BP spill response team has more than 20,000 fans at last count. The EPA is using Twitter to update the public through @Oil_Spill_2010 and @LisaPJackson (the agency’s administrator). And thousands of others are sharing oil spill updates on Twitter via the #oilspill hashtag (these appear on The Post‘s oil spill special report page.)

As a side note, Open Facebook Search lets you see what people are posting publicly on Facebook without having to log in. As Read Write Web says: “Even if you’ve never signed up for Facebook and never will, you can still use Open Facebook Search. It’s a search engine of the Facebook timeline and all the public data it contains outside of Facebook. Just type in your query and click “search” to see Facebook conversations, links, photos and videos in real-time.”