Look at it this way, there is so much information available that had you been interviewed by your local newspaper and a lazy reporter (I shall not use journalist) picks it up, thinks it'll make a nice little story, hides some info and puts it up as though he or she went out and interviewed the person, what would the difference be. Openly published things like SFN are easy to poach but as the News of the World and Daily Mirror (the ones who have been caught) stories reveal, it is easy to get at personal details. Snowden alerted us to the fact that everything we do bar sneeze (and perhaps that even) is collected.
I write academic articles and books, they are in the human rights domain (children, but nonetheless) and am quite easy to track down. The problem is that there are other people with my name, one or two of them up to no good or have been in the past, so I get tarred with their brush. That makes me (making this up) a dangerous commie who has scammed insurance companies out of millions (I wish) and have a second hand car business in Peckham with a partner named Derek. Either we live with it or we stay entirely out of it, but everything else you do is recorded so what is the difference at the end of the day.
I have had a quite nasty spat on Facebook, it was an open forum that has been closed now for quite some time because of what somebody implied I am, whereby the moderator knows me. So they got embroiled in a tussle. When the forum went closed, somehow the 'offender' stayed in although she had no reason to be in it in the first place. That was put directly to Facebook to resolve which they only eventually did reluctantly. I am not a Facebook fan as it happens, less so since then but I still have a look every couple of days. Ultimately though, if anybody wanted to use any of what they glean from Facebook or any other pages then usually they would have too little data to do much with. That is why there are hackers who will more or less walk into your hard disk and have everything without you ever noticing. They go phishing, dipping into as many people as it takes to get something worth going for and then doing whatever they want which might be having everything in your bank or identity theft for false passports. The possibilities are infinitesimal.
So, what is the option? Well, we might all gang up and demand that Tim Berners-Lee un-invent the WWW that opened all of this up or go completely offline ourselves. Bad choice if the latter given that banks, insurance, electricity providers, phone companies and so on are gradually forcing us to pay everything electronically. Then all possibility of online orders are lost. The list in long and getting longer.
I find what that reporter did was impertinent to say the very least because nothing was said to anybody here, so it is just a crib that she wants to use to look clever. The links to Facebook and other networks are patently clear on SFN but give away nothing more than this site itself. As for closed forum, well if that reporter is one of the several thousand members there is no way it could have been avoided and if SFN was closed to all but 'trustworthy' members who have sworn secrecy over a blood sacrifice in a dark cave somewhere, how would new members join? No, SFN is not just handing out our info, I am a member as well as part of the administration group, it is more or less universally available out there anyway. The risk here is no higher than elsewhere and unless we have something really dodgy to hide is part of our everyday reality for good or bad.