Today marked a huge day at Facebook as they have decided to open up their data stream via API to developers. Another major development and a step to an open standard for Lifestreaming was the simultaneous announcement that Facebook was supporting Activity Streams.

Of course they didn’t totally open things up and ReadWriteWeb provided details on the reality of what exactly will flow through the stream. Even the LA Times joined the throngs of those criticizing Facebook challenging that they aren’t as open as Twitter and stating that much of data will continue to be private and maintained by them.

Anyways, even if things haven’t totally opened up I think this is a step in the right direction and hopefully is just the start of continued plans to break down their walled garden. TechCrunch provided a nice live Qik stream of the technology demos. You can view the videos of the event here.

So I got to thinking a little about the announcement and began to wonder about how people will be able to share their data outside of Facebook now that they are allowed to. I immediately thought about how by default your profile and all aspects are set to private. So even with this announcement, I’m fairly sure that people will need to manually opt-in to begin sharing their stream outside of Facebook.

I figured that many people may not know where they need to do this and what options they have so I decided to record a screencast providing some basic details on where these settings are and how you can change them.

Note video best watched in HD mode on YouTube

Update: Alison Driscoll has posted a many more details regarding the privacy settings including how to utilize lists to better control what you share. You can view the post here.

A few days ago I was perusing my RSS feeds in Google Reader when I came across this story on Digg called Stalking 2.0: The Websites that Track Your Every Move (Voluntarily!). I knew right away this was related to Lifestreaming and by the headline I felt it was going to be a negative view so I clicked away. It was actually a link to an article on Mashable which I made my way to only after reading some of the comments on Digg first. I knew instantly that the mob on Digg had formed its opinion on the evil nature of the article so I made my way over there to see it.

Here’s the evil intro…no wonder it elicited concerns of spyware and privacy:

So, you don?t mind being followed and tracked? You don?t care if your friends can see what websites you?ve been to lately, what software you?ve been running, or even what music you?ve been listening to? Then you?ll love the web?s trend towards extreme openness: sharing everything you do on your computer. Sometimes referred to as sharing your ?attention? data, this is a growing market. Below, we round up 12 services that want to track your every move – voluntarily.

Following the comment threads and trackbacks from other blogs regarding the post it Mashable has successfully created a paranoid state.

Here’s a post called “Six Creepy Things I Can Learn About You“. He provides a method of finding out my favorite band, age, and my friends…oooooh….that’s so creepy!

Here’s another one called “Who Needs Privacy” where he says: “It is unnerving to see so many users literally broadcasting much of their personal information to the web.” He goes on to say that he feels it will lead to identity theft…If thieves can steal our identity by knowing our age, music tastes, and friends we’re doomed.

Later after reading the story I had an IM session with Kelly Abbott. After going back and forth a bit on the article and the state of Lifestreaming he asked me “what do you think can be done to change that sentiment?” and I responded “Education….and showing functionality to leverage the data to make it compelling to create Lifestreams. The whole privacy concern issue is ridiculous since we all use these services and the content is available individually from any of the sites….all lifestreaming does is aggregate it conveniently in one place for people.”

So now it’s time to put a positive spin on Lifestreaming…

Lifestreaming inevitably always seems to prompt concerns of privacy. The basis for creating a Lifestream first begins by either already using or finding a web service that by design already provides anybody the ability to see our activity. Last.fm allows users to find our profile page and see what music we listen to, while del.icio.us allows users to view our profile to see what we’re bookmarking.

Some sites and services allow you to filter what data you share. Del.icio.us allows you to set a flag to disable sharing every time you bookmark a page and Cluztr allows you to define sites which are private and won’t appear in your linkstream. Basically we, as the authors of our own Lifestreams, choose how open a book we want our lives to be for others to view.

Is Lifestreaming for everyone? No, but I want to nip mis-conceptions about privacy in the bud as quickly and easily as possible so others are more open to the concept. Jon (founder of Cluztr) sent word to me about several new features to his site and of them I quote the following.

Beefed-up privacy
This was the number 1 requested feature and we delivered. Users now have the ability to set the privacy level of their clickstreams. Default setting is public, but now can be set to private so only their friends can view it. Additionally, other new features allow users to distill their clickstreams by tagging sites or pages as “private”. This effectively gives users full control over their own clickstreams.

It’s good to see how users can help shape the quality and privacy of sources for our Lifestreams. And honestly, the data in our Lifestreams are harmless interesting data nuggets compared to the amount of private data about us that we can’t control sitting on corporate computers and hard drives all over the world. So without further ado and with my long-winded spiel. Here’s a snippet from the article on “Why computers must learn to forget”.

If whatever we do can be held against us years later, if all our impulsive comments are preserved, they can easily be combined into a composite picture of ourselves,” he writes in the paper. “Afraid how our words and actions may be perceived years later and taken out of context, the lack of forgetting may prompt us to speak less freely and openly.

I was also impressed to learn what a panopticon is. You can read the rest of the article on Ars Technica