It’s like an annual tradition: Facebook announces revisions to its privacy or data use policies, and the people of Facebook Nation respond by copying and pasting a boilerplate notice warning Mark Zuckerberg and his cronies that their political rants and snapshots of their kids’ drawings belong to them, thank you very much. The problem: this does not actually work.

If you want to control who can see what you post, pay a visit to the kindly Privacy Dinosaur, who can walk you through the basics of controlling who sees your stuff. Their new Privacy Basics guide lays things out even in terms that your most technology-addled cousin who thought that things he posted on his wife’s timeline weren’t visible can understand. Maybe.

The legal notice trend is only slightly less pointless than the “Cancer is bad: share if you agree!” memes that my Facebook friends share: at least it alerts people to impending policy changes, even as it encourages people to take completely ineffective action against them. You can’t change which parts of the Facebook terms of service apply to you by pasting them on your wall any more than you can change the terms of your mobile phone contract by shouting into the phone that you would really, really like to use your unlimited data service to tether your computer and download from BitTorrent.

That privacy notice you’re posting to Facebook? It won’t work [CNET]

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