Eye opening evolution of FaceBook in relation to privacy.

http://mattmckeon.com/facebook-privacy/



Then: 2005




Now: 2010

honey pot luring people in. As a person who values privacy, I never been interested in FB; however, I have a feeling that people like myself who don't do FB are soon going to be regarded suspiciously.

I had a Facebook for a year or so, distrusted first for its even more vague boundary of information ownership than it has now, loved it when the Facebook team got a stricter privacy policy and I found out how interactive it is, then started to resent it because it's as impersonal as any other social network, the admins took back privacy and don't respond to complaints fast enough, and it seemed like a liability since people have actually been fired for stuff they do and post on Facebook. The cons heavily outweigh the pros but for whatever reason I'm told there's 500 million people on Facebook that don't see it the same way as I do, but if someone wants to be my friend they need to do it the old-fashion way, because having a list with hundreds of strangers on it is still very lonely to me.

I'd rather have just ONE real friend I could trust and talk to about anything and hang out with any time then a collection of fellow members who are just strangers or acquaintances to try to make myself feel popular, too much damned narcissism right now.

i was bombarded by emails telling me to go in and post on some wall, look at messages and other crap and then.... i started getting emails from strangers telling me to do things on their facebook.

one time i went in for seconds, and the repercussions had me shaking in my boots. now it has dwindled down to a few emails here and there, and this is without going in since that one time

scary scary place.

personal info isn't required to join but once they do most FB users spill out a good portion if not their entire life. Requiring no personal info is a brilliant stragegy for getting people to unload personal info.

how does that make FB bad?

Whom I contact and vet....myself.

I'm not fond of photographs (stealing the soul and all that), and if I do show up in one, I claim the person shown is my friend...which according to my friends profile...I am.....

Schizoid, yes....safe, yes...win-win

Oh, wait, it's free.

You always do that on anything anti-Facebook, yup, I've seen you.



There are legitimate reasons to dislike Facebook, we're not just being ingrates.

Welcome to DU, by the way.

While it doesn't cost money, it's not "free". They want something from you. Your info and your friends info. So they can sell it to corporations and probably, at some point, to a government entity.

You can "cheat", like I do, and make up random crap for your profile. But I haven't seen too much of that kind of sensible behavior (IMHO). It's a generational zeitgeist of: "we're all in this together", which sociologically comes along every 4th generation or so. And which one of their own has deftly exploited for personal gain.

A true capitalist wouldn't blame him.

But I'm not a true capitalist. And while I find this ironic. I also find it grim and very disheartening:





because many of them have never had to suffer the dark side of having the most innocent and innocuous information used against them. The woman who was removed from disability insurance because FB pictures showed her smiling (not water skiing or bungee jumping...merely smiling at the beach) has learned a lesson. But it could, very quickly, go so horribly wrong for many more...millions more.

And unlike other eras, where people were persecuted for a slip of the tongue or being at the wrong place at the wrong time, time can't erase or erode these digital fossils. They are permanent. Always accessible (for the right amount of money) and always actionable.

That's the problem many of us have with FB.

Imagine if the worst excesses of your youth, the things that now embarrass you that you didn't think twice about in those hormone heady days, were always hovering over your shoulder, able to become instantly present and fresh.

It's not free. As described, it's a honey trap.

and people should operate on a worst-case-scenario basis when considering what kinds of stuff to post.

That said, there is probably room for tighter regulation of things like, say, taking a woman off disability insurance because there's a picture of her smiling at the beach. (Got a link for that story? Not that I don't believe you- I really would be interested in reading it) ... But crap like people getting booted from insurance policies for bogus reasons was taking place long before Facebook.

Strictly speaking, however, it IS free. You don't have to pay, you don't have to give any more information than you want, you do have some control over how that information is shared, and if you really don't like it, don't do it at all.

My problem with these threads (and no, I am not nor have I ever been affiliated with Facebook, although I am on there) is that they are part of a generalized pattern of grousing and complaining about pretty much anything and everything that someone, somewhere, might like. Apple products, Space Exploration, Facebook, IHOP.. It doesn't matter. There is a poster upthread who ostensibly is complaining about FB's privacy settings, but if you read further, the real problem the poster has is with the "narcissism" he/she imagines has taken root in our society, that Facebook is a cause/symptom of.

So, really, what a lot of this is IMHO is bitching about the cultural zeitgeist, disguised as something else.

FaceBook has a handy this is your link post history page, so finding what I've posted....no problem.

http://rawstory.com/2009/2009/11/woman-loses-health-insurance-smiling-facebook/
http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/AheadoftheCurve/woman-loses-insurance-benefits-facebook-pics/story?id=9154741


http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2010/04/facebook-further-reduces-control-over-personal-information





http://women.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/women/the_way_we_live/article7096105.ece


http://edition.cnn.com/2010/TECH/03/29/facebook.job-seekers/index.html


http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/worldnews/article-1255888/Facebook-founder-Mark-Zuckerberg-hacked-emails-rivals-journalists.html


http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/london/8552740.stm


http://mytrampingview.blogspot.com/2009/04/sick-employee-fired-because-of-facebook.html


http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/33883605/ns/technology_and_science-tech_and_gadgets/ in this case it didn't ruin his life...it may have saved it.


http://msn.foxsports.com/cfb/story/oregon-ducks-jamere-holland-022110


http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1155971/Teenage-office-worker-sacked-moaning-Facebook-totally-boring-job.html


http://www.heraldonline.com/2008/11/12/950992/charlotte-teachers-face-action.html


http://gawker.com/5520933/wikileaks-claims-facebook-deleted-their-fan-page-because-they-promote-illegal-acts


http://msn.foxsports.com/cfb/story/oregon-ducks-jamere-holland-022110


Aren't you sorry you asked?

I'm particularly interested in what the eff has to say.

As far as facebook and the like goes, I have kind of a "There's no such thing as a free lunch" attitude. It's "free", but obviously they're paying the bills somehow. They have to have an angle, or more likely, several. Certainly, like I said, it's a good idea to be extra-aware of what info you put out there.

As for the bit you posted about collecting ip addresses and other info; I think that's standard boilerplate, most websites have similar policies and do similar stuff, AFAIK. Lots of firefox plug-ins, like noscript, can block some of the stuff websites might try to do. :shrug:

The pictures not only showed her smiling at the beach, they showed her "enjoying herself during a male strip-tease show at a Chippendales show".

Now.. come on. We're not talking about someone with two broken legs- we're talking about someone who is saying "I'm so depressed, not only can't I work, you have to pay me not to work".

And that's Canada, which has an entirely different medical and insurance system than we do. Maybe Canadians, since they all pay into the system via their taxes, aren't willing to put up with someone collecting disability insurance for depression that keeps her from being able to show up at work, but doesn't keep her from tanning at the beach or going to strip clubs.

:shrug:

Anyway, as far as that woman goes.. Not a very bright move on her part to post those pictures publicly. I mean, duh.

privacy issues remind me of an episode from the original Twilight Zone where aliens come to earth and state they want to "serve man" and all too humans happily accepted the aliens invitations and boarded their spacecraft. However it turned out the aliens bible, "To Serve Man" was actually a cookbook. They took a lot of humans to their planet to eat them. ...

I'll respond to you and return to the issue of narcissism online in a second. First I want to say about Facebook, not Myspace, not Twitter, not any other site that is the Facebook is the only one I've used that KEEPS changing its privacy policy. I've used other sites that actually did keep their privacy policy for years, but with Facebook it changes like seasons. I also have never used a social networking site that actually took privacy BACK after it gave it to users, I don't know if there was good intention in how they made it mandatory to share your name, likes, photo, gender, network and friends, but they did it unilaterally and passed off a new, less private privacy policy like it was a great, strict new thing everyone could love. A few years ago it was actually stated that if you posted something on it would be stored, you couldn't even change, edit or modify your name without Facebook performing some kind of "verification" or "confirmation" that I still don't understand, and this is from a person who is 1. concerned about privacy, 2. took the assumption that with how overhyped Facebook was and how technical the site that a people must be happy with privacy and feel secure in their control over their information and 3. made the mistake of using his last name and after waiting more than 2 weeks for this "verification" to do through just said 'fuck it' and deleted the whole thing to return sometime later to find for a while that things had gotten better.

Oh, I'm just paranoid, right? No, there's certainly no phoniness or egotism online, it makes PERFECT sense to add hundreds and thousands of people you've never even met to your friendlist, because that's what friends are, total strangers, right? Hey, you like links, right? Only took a fraction of a second on Google.

http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/AheadoftheCurve/story?id=5887520&page=1
http://www.switched.com/2010/02/01/how-many-facebook-friends-do-we-have-for-real/
http://www.columbiatribune.com/news/2009/may/10/facebook-takes-narcissism-to-new-level/
http://www.livescience.com/culture/080926-facebook-narcissism.html
http://arstechnica.com/old/content/2008/09/narcissists-easy-to-spot-on-facebookif-you-know-how.ars
http://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/virtual-friendship-and-the-new-narcissism
http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/2044625/5_ways_to_spot_a_narcissist_from_their.html?cat=25
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PN2HAroA12w <- I LOVE this one.

But frankly if you guys are so in love with Facebook that's good for you, go superpoke Mark Zuckerberg for all I care, but if you don't like the truth just stay on Facebook instead of insulting me. Facebook is a fad anyway, so get your kicks while you can.

over a national I.D. card will gleefully put their entire lives, with photos, on Facebook. A woman I know who frequents Facebook told me she discovered another web site - the name escapes me - that had captured all of her information, as well as her husband's, right down to their property tax bill, birthdays, children and credit scores. She checked for my name - a person who has never been on Facebook - and it wasn't there. Nor was my husband's. As a semi-private person, that was a real relief to me.

I haven't seen anything linking any of my info to FaceBook.


What I DID find, last night, was info linking right back to "Classmates.Com", on two other so-called High School Reunion sites.

Photos and stuff.

I am NOT happy.

They have my name, my sex, my relationship status, the month and day of birth (and a fake year), the schools I attended, and a gmail email account. That's it!

I am so glad a savvy person helped set up my FB account. Facebook's got nothing on me that I need to conceal from the world.

I have an alias on FB and would never put any of my personal information on it.