Today I was faced with a big scare when my four-year-old woke up with neck pain, screaming at 2:00 in the morning. We rushed her to the emergency room and waited for a while to discover that, thankfully, it was just a muscle issue and not something broken, meningitis, or anything else from my wildest nightmares. I wanted to post it on Facebook when I got home so my family would know she was okay and I wouldn’t have to call every single person (status updates have been making our lives that much more simple, amirite?), not to mention explain my whereabouts to anyone expecting me for various appointments. Plus, it’s just nice to be able to share such good, relieving news with friends and family.

Except… I didn’t post it. In fact, I haven’t been posting hardly anything remotely personal in weeks since Facebook has decided to go all snoopy in our business. Not only are there websites in existence to search your FB stuff in order to use it against you; Facebook itself has become so lax in enforcing privacy settings—indeed, even in changing them without much, if any, notice—that people can no longer choose which parts of their profiles they wish to remain hidden because, guess what? They’re available for complete public viewing.

It’s not that my daughter’s ordeal is a huge privacy concern, but it’s definitely nobody else’s business. What if she grows up and tries to get healthcare on her own only for someone to discover a “preexisting condition” when she was four? (Hopefully the new healthcare laws will not allow that to happen, but our insurance companies sure know their loopholes.)

We shouldn’t have to peer over our shoulders every time we want to post something for our family and friends to hear about. Sure, posting about every cheese sandwich we eat is very boring and tedious to read, but if that’s what people want to share with one another then by all means, they should share it. Facebook should maintain a general sense of decency by letting people choose what they want to share with whom—and those of us who can’t stomach the BS should just leave until they start doing it. I’ve had plenty of friends either consider leaving, spend less time on the site, or even delete all of their personal information simply because of this baloney, and I’ve definitely diminished my own time spent there, too.

Send Facebook a message through the American Civil Liberties Union website here. Let them know that when you signed up for Facebook and “agreed to its conditions,” you did not agree to the condition changes that have been made regarding your personal privacy.