A few weeks ago I blogged about the nearing of a Federal Privacy Deal between Facebook and the Federal Trade Commission. Yesterday an agreement was reached, with Mark Zuckerberg saying that Facebook had proactively addressed the FTC’s complaints, while also putting his hand up to admit that his company had “made a bunch of mistakes“.

As part of the process, the FTC accused Facebook of, and an eight-count complaint, sharing users’ personal information with third parties without their knowledge or consent, changing privacy practices without informing users, and claiming to have a program to verify the security of apps when it didn’t.

So what exactly does this Federal Privacy Deal mean? A number of specific rules are laid out in the settlement, which Facebook must abide by – one of which is that it has to be much more transparent about its privacy practices going forward.

However, commentators are saying that Facebook is already doing this. Admittedly the company now has to submit itself to a biannual review from a third-party oversight board for the next 20 years, but the company seems to have learned from its mistakes in relation to user privacy. In fact, there is more control over your own privacy within Facebook than even before.

With services now becoming, for the most part, opt-in, the onus should now be on the third-party app developers to fully explain why they want access to certain parts of your profile, but more importantly, the responsibility should lie with you – the user.

Taking a step back from Facebook and looking at the internet as a whole – heck, let’s just say looking at life as a whole – we need to be more and more mindful about how we go about sharing private information and who we share it with. It’s all well and good to play the blame game. ”So and so shouldn’t have done this”, “company X should have warned me about that” – just think how many times we have ticked a box saying that we’ve read and understood the Ts&Cs when in actual fact we’ve barely glanced at them.

At the end of the day it’s your private information, so make sure you take the appropriate measures to make sure it stays that way – private.