Facebook is in a swivet, having an all-hands meeting after the New York Times printed this:
That’s the graph of the different privacy options in Facebook, which has a privacy policy longer than the US Constitution (and everyone knows what that means). If it isn’t obvious that Facebook doesn’t give a shit about your privacy, here’s a tweet from the Times reporter who did the Facebook piece:
My feelings about Facebook are about the same as DougJ’s about Bloggingheads. As far as I’m concerned, we’d all be better off if the damn thing blew up tomorrow. But I’m sure I can count on the comments to set me straight on that score.
TomG
I marked my account for deletion last week. It takes two weeks (because they are hoping you change your mind).
I won’t miss it, partly because I never got too drawn in to their little attractions, and partly because privacy does mean something to me. But I understand if people don’t feel the same way.
Dog is My Co-Pilot
I marked my account for deletion, as well. I started a page because my neighbor kept bugging me to do it. Then she ended up dropping her account anyway, because she claimed it was too addictive! I got a little tired of seeing posts from my aunt about her Farmville exploits and from another friend about dusting her house. It ended up being a huge waste of time and I wanted to find a better way to spend it.
cleek
butbutbut… what would i do without on-line Scrabble!?
seriously. me’s a scrabbaholic.
Morbo
I resisted it for years but now grudgingly use it minimally. If it blew up tomorrow I would be happy that the people and events I use it to keep up with would use other options.
MikeJ
Are they having an all hands to figure out how to make privacy settings more confusing? Upset that there’s a clear, easy to understand explanation of it, so obviously everything must change?
MikeJ
@cleek:
Shouldn’t be that hard to implement in a canvas object.
jon
It doesn’t take a rocket surgeon with ESP to figure out how to get privacy settings where I want them to be. It does take a tiny bit of work, however.
It’s a useful tool for many reasons, but it relies more and more on the laziness of its users to make its money. Am I in favor of a private corporation relying on laziness? Not really, but ask me some time after I’ve stopped at a convenience store or ATM, shopped online, bought something at a yard sale, or bought a diet or low-calorie something or other.
Butch
I’m not going to set you straight. I won’t go near Facebook or any of the other “social” sites. What a waste of time.
Alice Blue
I’m an old fogey baby boomer, but I never understood the point of Facebook (or Twitter for that matter). What is the obsession with letting everyone know what you’re doing every single minute of every day?
Off to work now. And stay offa my lawn!
birthmarker
I made a fake page with an unused email address, for the purpose of some light lurking, upon the advice of a friend. Later when I logged on, it pulls up my usual email address and said this address was associated with my account and did I want to blah blah blah. Since the email address wasn’t associated to the account BY ME, I happily ended my daliance with facebook. It’s not worth the slight voyeurism you get out of it.
I’m not aware of all internet traditions, but I guess they use some sort of “spider” program to grab other email accounts? My question is, did they grab it from yahoo or from my laptop??
geg6
Unfortunately, I don’t have a choice when it comes to Facebook. I am required by my supervisor to have an account since it is a place where students hang out and where I can have “dialogue” with them.
The sad thing is that they never contact me there to have any sort of financial aid discussion or to read my reminders or to even just say hi. All I get is their photos with beer bongs and tickle matches in their dorm rooms. And sometimes they bicker with each other.
It’s pretty worthless, but the campus Chancellor says I gotta have it, so I do. Don’t have anything very personal there, though.
Incertus (Brian)
Zuckerman’s right, even though he’s being a real douche about it–there is no such thing as personal privacy anymore, at least not unless you’re going to pull a Unabomber and withdraw from society completely. It’s not just Facebook, though that’s a big part of it.
I understand why people don’t use it, and I don’t blame them. It works for me, but I’m not going to proselytize for it. However, I also live a fairly public life, and that’s not true for everyone, nor should it be.
neill
yuh take equal parts narcissism and technology, ya add corporate power and corporate greed — whaa? is that the national anthem playing faintly in the background? is that the sound of marching feet?
zmulls
I dislike 80% of Facebook, but there’s about 20% I find valuable. I’ve reconnected with a few “long-lost” friends and keeping in touch with an important handful of people has become easier. I appreciate seeing updates from people I don’t get to call or e-mail with regularly, and it’s easier to drop a quick line or note “while I’m logged on.”
Still thinking about it longterm. Last night I locked down practically every privacy setting I have to “Friends Only” (not even “Friends of Friends.” Did the same for my son, who just opened his account a couple of weeks ago.
Currently in the midst of thinking (“hmmm….if I shut down on Facebook, whose e-mails would I have to harvest first…..”)
David
OT:
New news aggregation site~
http://www.nationalconfidential.com/
some sample headlines:
CONSERVATIVES PUSH ANCIENT NEWS IN KAGAN SMEAR ATTEMPT
“KITCHEN SINK” STRATEGY UNDERWAY AS CONFIRMATION SEEMS MORE AND MORE LIKELY…
PIZZA HUT: WE DON’T ADVERTISE ON GLENN BECK
ChockFullO'Nuts
Not only does FB’s interface suck in terms of privacy configuration, some of the features just do not work correctly.
It’s a mess, almost as bad as Word Press. Okay, it is worse than Word Press. And that is saying something. Something sort of godawful, really.
Facebook is about as evolved as email was back in the days of the early AOL boom … in other words, not at all. Crappy, disjointed, about as secure as swiss cheese.
It’s surprising that the FB gods didn’t prepare for this … okay, I’m not surprised. Just another software outfit letting their user base be the guinea pigs for their damned experiments because that is cheaper than doing it right.
Zifnab
When you’ve got an entire group of friends on Facebook, it’s a great social medium. I’ve put together more parties on Facebook, coordinated more drinking nights, and been invited to more weddings than via any other internet application.
It’s a great place to store vacation photos and share them with curious friends. It’s a fun place to brag or gripe about your day or read about other people bragging and griping about theirs.
I mean, Facebook is in the same sphere of usefulness as blogging.
The privacy infringement is obnoxious, but the core social nexus is a fantastic idea.
Tom Traubert
@cleek:
Go here for online Scrabble: http://www.isc.ro/. You know nothing of wasted time until you’ve been there; enjoy.
ChockFullO'Nuts
Talk about damning with faint praise!
cleek
@MikeJ:
no, probably not.
but if i did it, i’d expect to get beat down by Hasbro’s intellectual property lawyers.
and that’s probably less fun than a rack full of vowels.
@Tom Traubert:
yay!
AlanDean
The NY Times article states 500 Billion minutes a month are spent on Facebook. I agree with Betty White on SNL– what a waste of time. In my day we had a phonebook she says but we didn’t spend all afternoon looking at it and looking at others vacation photos was a punishment. Trite but true. I say let Facebook blowup. The Zuck may be a great programmer but his social skills need work.
And to those who think privacy is dead I’m sorry but if that is true and we are certainly working towards that being the case, we need to redouble our efforts to protect our privacy. I’m not knocking the concept of Facebook, far from it. I don’t use it but in a world where getting connected to others is difficult at best something like Facebook can be a great tool. Maybe Facebook needs an adult at the helm like Google.
J.A.F. Rusty Shackleford
“They bought their tickets. They knew what they were getting into. I say, let them crash.”
KDP
I’ve been unhappy with FB since the ‘upgrade’ last November. Two weeks ago, I locked everything down. I then went to another browser, on another computer, and searched for myself. I no longer seem to come up to a non-Facebook user.
Why have I not deleted my account? Gary Farber is one reason along with a host of other friends from around the world whose antics and activities I can follow through Facebook. I rarely post updates or links and I removed most of my ‘connections’ nor do I ‘like’ anything now that liking creates a connection. About the most I do now is to post comments to someone else’s update. FB is a perfect vehicle for someone like me. I enjoy the company of friends, but as a natural introvert, I don’t engage in phone calls, emails or other social interactions. FB lets me know what is going on without having to extend myself to direct engagement. Oh, my, that does sound lazy and self-involved, doesn’t it? Sigh.
General Egali Tarian Stuck
I don’t use FB, twitter, or anything but blogs. The internet is slowly becoming an accurate snapshot overall of American thoughts from most walks of life. And the picture is not all that pretty imo. I can hardly read most blogs comment sections anymore, left or right, and even this one is getting more difficult by the day. I may just retro back to paper news, but they also seem to be getting sucked into the vortex of freewheeling crazy that is the internet. And some are just disappearing altogether.
Punchy
@cleek: Me too. Love the game. Problem is, the wife is uber-competitive, and doesn’t take losing well….at all.
Can a marriage survive multiple triple-word-scores involving a Z or Q? Newlywed wants to know.
Kristine
I use Facebook as a self-promo tool. Many writers use it. My editor has a page, as well as my publisher. I also have a MySpace page–although that has fallen by the wayside as FB has picked up steam–and a Twitter account.
I have also been able to make contact with high school and college friends, which is cool.
I don’t hate it. I don’t post anything I want to keep private.
jibeaux
Well, I’m going to gripe about something else. I’m going to gripe about people always comparing the length of things to the length of the Constitution, as if they would be more meritorious if only they were shorter than the Constitution.
Every day, I read multiple contracts which can be summed up as “plaintiff hereby settles his claim in exchange for payment in the amount of $x”, and they’re all longer than the Constitution. And they need to be. They are legal documents with legal requirements that have to be covered, for statutory reasons or for the protection of one party or the other. I don’t know if FB’s privacy policy needs to be as long as it is, but snarking about specific legal documents being longer than the Constitution makes about as much sense as complaining that your car is longer than your bed. Different. Purposes. /endrant
I like FB, once I figured out how to hide Farmville and people I don’t care about. People link to interesting things, and post funny status updates, and I like seeing how people from high school turned out, even if the answer is almost always: pretty much exactly like you expected them to.
jwb
@ChockFullO’Nuts: Very little about FB works correctly, and I’ve come to believe that that’s because FB wants it that way.
Rosalita
@Zifnab:
I’m with you. I’ve lived in different parts of the country and I am very happy to have a way to continue friendships with people I don’t see anymore, or haven’t seen in years.
I’ve been careful from the get-go about the privacy and I keep an eye on it. I keep my personal info to a minimum.
I also ‘hide’ friends who post too much inane BS on the news feed and hide all applications, like fucking farmville.
David in NY
See, people like John don’t need Facebook because he’s got a blog that serves the same purpose for him. About 35% of what he posts is pure Facebook material — cats, dogs, dandelions, etc. And he has acquired a lot of friends who respond much as people do on Facebook (but with more in the way of side discussions).
For some of us without the time to maintain an actual blog (and who, without Facebook’s friending mechanism wouldn’t get any readers), Facebook serves the same purpose. (Lots of people don’t enjoy even the minimal Facebook sort of blogging about the salad dressing they’re making, etc., and if I were like that, I’d quit it. But I like posting stuff that I’m interested in and getting feedback, and Facebook works in that way.)
So I don’t exactly buy John’s professed disdain for the whole thing. He has the equivalent of a Facebook page, and it’s here.
Walker
In-laws in are in New Zealand, and the extended family are in Poland, so my wife cannot live without these forms of connectivity.
With that said, she has a CS PhD and claims she has no problem with the privacy settings in Facebook.
South of I-10
@cleek: Play Words with Friends? How did I live before without an iPhone?
Walker
@David in NY:
Except that the post is by mistermix, and John has yet to comment in this thread.
jwb
@David in NY: NB: This is mistermix’s post, not John’s.
matoko_chan
if someone wants to stalk you fb is a goldmine.
if your stalker is netsavvy there is absolutely nothing the fb admins can do to protect you.
blather about the benefits of social networking all you want, fb is just a meatmarket bereft of any nanoparticle of actual security or privacy.
Poopyman
@Tom Traubert:
That’s a Romanian site, you know. (.ro country code)
Be very careful there, my friends.
Montysano
@Zifnab: I’m with you. I’ve been a little baffled with all the recent FB hate; it has a “all the kool kidz are doin it” element to it.
I’m from a small farming community in the Midwest. Reconnecting with people who I have known since I was 5 years old just feels right. Some of them are wingnut idiots, much like the larger world.
I’ve also reconnected with friends from my “lost years” in the late 70s – early 80s. Twice, I was sitting with FB open, when a long-lost friend suddenly pops up. Kinda cool.
David in NY
@jwb:
Crap. I can’t even read and it’s to late to edit my mistake. I quit. Just ignore anything I said to day.
cleek
@Punchy:
i’m the competitive one in our house. and my wife is the most uncompetitive person i’ve ever met; she likes scrabble, but doesn’t seem to care if she wins or not. so, we don’t play much FB scrabble against each other unless there’s a third person in the game – usually a mutual friend who’s also very competitive.
General Egali Tarian Stuck
@General Egali Tarian Stuck: Though Flickr is a great invention with the means to filter any craziness that comes your way. I need to reconnect with a once sizeable network of friends there.
Poopyman
Oh, and I think I have a FB account under this pseudonym that I haven’t accessed in about a year. I occasionally get people I don’t know wanting me to friend them.
I have no friends. Not on facebook, either. ;^P
mistermix
@David in NY: If you’ve been watching my posts, I don’t post about my dog, kid, wife or what I’m cooking, here or anywhere else.
@AlanDean: Back in the day, people used to have slide shows of their vacations and have others over to watch them. I thought we had progressed past that, but apparently FB fills that niche.
Tom Traubert
@Poopyman:
Yes, I know, as do the countless tournament players from around the world who spend their time there. I’ve played on the site for at least the past ten years; never had a single problem of any sort.
HeartlandLiberal
I work in a major mid-western Division I Athletics program.
Our compliance office now makes part of their mission to student athletes a regular series of communications about the problems with Facebook and privacy, trying to educate the kids on the dangers of the medium.
It is a difficult task. The current crop of college kids take altogether too much for granted and do not look under the hood, but just see the shiny surface toys. And like all youth, they think they are going to live forever, and what they do now will not come back to haunt them when they leave college.
They are not thinking ahead to the future employer, banker, or credit company, all of whom now use Facebook to look people up, and if they find their identities online there (and elsewhere) factor in what they see on their decisions regarding employment, credit, and everything else. (I admit to having googled people who are applying to work for me, and the results I have found have place a couple of applications in the circular file.)
It is no longer true that on the Internet no one knows if you are a dog.
glynor
My feelings about facebook?
Best Get-Laid-Quick-Scheme Ever.
stuckinred
A waste of time? Please
A lifetime with a beautiful woman is like a second
A second with your hand on a hot burner is like a lifetime
do what you want with yours and I’ll do what I want with mine
cleek
@matoko_chan:
shit yeah.
my first week on FB, i got a flood of those quiz/survey things: what’s your favorite color? what’s your pet’s name? what was your first car?
i’m thinking, “these are ‘security questions’. why would i post this stuff, along with my name, in a public place?”
all my friends are like “nah, it’s fun! don’t be so paranoid!”
@HeartlandLiberal:
and i’ve been on the other end of that.
that’s why i’m now “cleek”, and why i try not to link that pseud to my real identity.
stuckinred
@David in NY: Ding
zzyzx
My philosophy about facebook is the same about everything on the Internet. If you post something anywhere – a private mailing list, a closed web forum – it’s likely to become public. If you want to keep something to yourself, keep it off the Internet.
Will
People who comment on blogs calling Facebook a waste of time is about as funny as listening to Star Wars nerds hating on Star Trek nerds.
jwb
@cleek: “all my friends are like ‘nah, it’s fun! don’t be so paranoid!'”
Priceless!
Woodrowfan
I kind of like it, as I’ve reconnected with some old friends from school. But I don’t put anything on my page I wouldn’t want broadcast to my boss, my Mom, or to my worst enemy…
Face
OT:
I predicted this very behavior. Just like now any and all baggage left alone for a nanosecond is considered a bomb by default, now any and all cars are under scrutiny.
Gonna be a loooooooooonnng summer in NYNY.
ChockFullO'Nuts
@jibeaux:
Totally don’t. The great document serves as a convenient benchmark for short, compact, powerful information sets.
The idea is not that everything should be shorter than the Constitution, it’s that it makes you stand back and take a look at the big picture. Do they really mean us to think that it takes more mumbo jumbo than 6k words to describe the privacy policy for Facebook?
I think their state of the art is described perfectly by the NYT diagram. That diagram accurately illustrates FB’s layout if you are looking to manage the privacy features. It’s a grotesque piece of crap, nobody took the time to think it through and make it simple and powerful and understandable.
And in this day and age, what makes these people think that users will read all this crap and learn all these configuration mazes? It is as if every car model out there had a completely different arrangement for where the pedals are. And then made you drive 36 different cars a day. You know, because there isn’t one good basic way to do something …. basic. Because software people fall in love with their own crap. Because Not Invented Here(tm) is still the main obstacle to standardization and simplicity.
Facebook is a trainwreck, I am glad to see them being called on it. And they are far from the worst out there. But I don’t know if they will ever beat Microsoft or ComputerAssociates for inventing tangles of tangles. But the worst I ever saw was Cloverleaf, circa 2001. Or maybe MQSeries. Of course those are industrial strength trainwrecks, but Facebook certainly has the idea for trainwreck-for-home-use.
D. Aristophanes
Facebook is like herpes – most of the time it’s benign but you can never really get rid of it and eventually everybody’s going to have it.
zzyzx
Why do I facebook?
(1) I’ve reconnected with a few people
(2) I need to do something to kill time on slow days at work
and
(3) I like having a semi-public forum to post not very important things.
I don’t worry too much about privacy because I don’t think anyone in the government cares about what I think is the best show of the 2009 Phish fall tour…
MikeJ
@Face: I wonder who’s going to pay for that guy’s windows?
eemom
um…..didn’t we already have this thread?
comrade scott's agenda of rage
@Morbo:
Same here. I dislike it but needed it for our business and to track a few friends who moved over to it and abandoned Live Journal.
South of I-10
@matoko_chan: I search people on a regular basis. Word to the wise: If you are involved in an accident and plan to file a suit, don’t post about it on your wide open FB/MySpace and then change your story.
Tom Traubert
@jibeaux:
Also, and as anyone who’s ever read it knows, the Constitution really is not all that long. Especially in light of what it is.
stuckinred
@eemom: Like a bad penny or a boomerang.
Punchy
@cleek:
f
We tried
n
d
friends
n and
g v e
v to
y e
r
make
i n f
n f
e o
d r
t
but they just made dumb mistakes that led to mad points by either myself or the wife, leaving the other non-pointer to stew at the dumbness of the newbies. Alas….
Edit — that was supposed to be a clever Scrabble-esque reply, but FYWP just completely biffed the post. Now it reads like crap.
JR
Am I the only one who thinks that tweet proves that Nick Bilton of the NYT doesn’t know the difference between “off the record” and “on background?”
The way I’ve always understood it is: if you’re publishing the information somewhere with any attribution at all, you’re not keeping it “off the record.” That includes Twitter.
twiffer
@Punchy: why are you playing it online? buy a board, play strip scrabble. problem solved.
toujoursdan
I’m with Zifnab.
I’m from Ottawa and family in Montréal, Halifax and Vancouver; old friends from when I lived in Calgary, Auckland New Zealand and Dallas, networks with Episcopal Church clergy, laity and progressive caucuses within the denomination; networks of blogging and political friends and connections with gay, hockey and Canadian-interest groups here in New York City.
There is no easier way to manage those connections than Facebook. It may be a waste of time, but it would be a much greater waste of time if I tried to manage those connections and stay current with all those people and events independently.
Darkmoth
I think FB is one of those Rorshach tests. If you would never post your address in a public place, you probably dislike or disdain FB. If you want all your friends to know you just pulled a fluffy load from the dryer, you will see it as useful.
My daughter is constantly texting her friends (and by constantly I really do mean continuously). I see mine every few weeks at poker or for a movie. FB simply magnifies that gap in social interaction styles.
twiffer
@zzyzx: ah, but the gov knows you like phish. which means you’re a DFH and must have a bunch of pot at home. be prepared for a raid.
Patrick Lightbody
I’m not a fan of Facebook at all. I worked at a social network company as a software engineer before Facebook was even a twinkle in Mark Zuckerberg’s eye, and I was never comfortable with the amount of information being shared by these sites on behalf of technically unsophisticated users.
That said, I can say without a doubt that Facebook’s recent Chief Privacy Offer, Chris Kelly, who is running for Attorney General in CA, is a rock solid dude. Before he joined Facebook I had the pleasure of working with him and was blown away by how down to earth he was despite having gone through the Harvard + Yale rigmarole. Heck, he even flew out to Vegas with a few of the engineers to go to a Social Distortion concert :)
So if you’re in California and thinking about voting for him, don’t hold Facebook against him. He’d be a huge asset for California!
jibeaux
@ChockFullO’Nuts:
You totally don’t what?
This is my second favorite graph, personally. My first favorite is something my husband brought home from a conference years ago, and to my knowledge is not online, but makes absolutely, unequivocally, no sense whatsoever.
jcgrim
I don’t understand why people want to tell the world about every minor detail in their lives on Facebook.
I grew up with a mother who never allowed us to have any secrets. She read our diaries, dug through our trash, rummaged through our drawers, listened in on our phone conversations. Those discoveries are still (40 years later!) part of her conversations with friends and extended family.
Once you’ve lost your privacy, you can’t recover it.
wonkie
I like facebook and I will miss it if disappears.
I reacquainted myself with three old friends from thirty years back and all three frienndships are better now than they were then. I keep in causally daily contact with my brothher and sister. We all share by posting pictures our little day to day advantures. Its like living in the same neighborhood. Is it private? Of course not. If I want privacy I’ll use the phone.
ChrisS
@HeartlandLiberal:
“The current crop of college kids take altogether too much for granted and do not look under the hood”
That’s probably true of most college-aged kids (and high-school kids as well), regardless of the decade. The technology has just changed. Besides, facebook became popular because it was easy to use, aesthetically pleasing (compared to the garish myspace pages) and relatively secure back in the day when it was available on just a few college campuses and you needed an appropriate .edu email address.
Facebook’s privacy settings are troublesome, particularly if one wants to play, say, scrabble, and to install the application it needs to access your information, your friends information, you pictures, etc. However, with about 5 minutes time you can disable nearly everything. Facebook for me is 99% goofy status updates, photo-sharing, connecting with lost friends (I’m a veteran) and socializing (our kickball league is scheduled on facebook, as are parties, BBQs and family get-togethers). What isn’t on there and available for public viewing (anyone other than me)? My birthday, phone number, address, or email address.
I’d like say that like most technological, the problems stem from trying to make things easy to use for the “general public.”
zmulls
@wonkie:
Do you remember MySpace? Good times. *g*
rob!
Christ, it appears John Cole’s monumental crankiness bleeds from his posts through the intertubes into the brains of many BJ readers. (I guess I should start wearing gloves when I come here)
I love Facebook. I don’t post anything I don’t want the world to know, simple. I don’t assume anything I post on the internet is private, ever.
I’ve used Facebook to help find homes for dogs who were about to be put down–the word gets out and spreads to people I never knew existed who were able to help. A blog simply wouldn’t work the same way, or as fast.
I’m also putting a book together, and via FB I’ve been able to contact people I would’ve had to go through endless layers of bureaucracy to get to previously. Its a great marketing tool.
If you don’t want to use Facebook, fine, then don’t. But all these comments about how its a waste of time or stupid or evil are fucking ridiculous. YOU’RE POSTING A COMMENT ON A BLOG COMPLAINING ABOUT WHAT A WASTE OF TIME ANOTHER SITE ON THE INTERNET IS. You haters remind of Classic Star Trek fans sneering at TNG fans thinking they’re a bunch of nerds.
Self-actualization, UR DOIN IT WRONG!
zzyzx
@twiffer: I’m on the board of directors for the Mockingbird Foundation that wrote 2 huge books about Phish. It’s not much of a secret.
ruemara
I love the facebook. I have very customized privacy settings and figured those out within the first month on FB, because I’m paranoid like that. If it blew up tomorrow, I’d be fine. Would it confuse you that I’m happy about this tempest because startup guys are all assholes who people seem to think give a fuck, but really, only care about cash & egos? I worked in the bay area for a while, I wouldn’t pee on any of these guys if they’re on fire.
William
@birthmarker:
They probably got your correct address from one of your friend’s address books. One way they try to connect you up with everybody is by telling new users, “Hey, show us your email address book and we’ll find all your friends right away!” When your friend says that their friend John Smith is actually you, then they check with you to make sure the email address is right.
So it comes out of trying to be helpful and make it easy for people to join, but for a lot of people it’s still kinda creepy.
Randy P
@Alice Blue: Well, I too am an old fogey baby boomer, and I have an account.
Half my high-school graduating class seems to be on there, so I have reestablished contact with a few people I had wondered about. Kind of an instant reunion thing, and I do actually enjoy the reunions I go to. But only because there’s a couple who hosts a party for grads from the years around my year. That’s a good bunch of people. The “official” events I could just as easily skip.
As for my facebook account, it’s mosly idle. I sign on about every few months. No, I can’t see the point of those minute by minute updates. One of my neighbors and a couple of my nieces seem to use it that way, literally every few minutes. I also get updates that mean nothing in particular to me from my rediscovered high-school buddies.
But it’s a one-way pipe. I probably haven’t thought of more than three things I felt like posting in the last year.
jeffreyw
Photo sharing on facebook? Tell me more. The world needs more hummingbird pics.
matoko_chan
well….now we are seeing kids applying to college trying to purge the web of their data so ivy-league registrars and future employers can’t get access to their juvenille silliness.
can’t be done, actually.
What if Elena Kagan had been on fb as a tween?
lawl.
Randy P
@jibeaux: “I will now explain in the rest of this brief what each of those arrows means”.
I was once at a conference where somebody put up a huge complicated table full of tiny print, too tiny to read from the audience. Now, being in a technical area, I’m used to people putting up complicated tables or graphs. Sometimes there’s a lot of data to present and completeness may require showing it. But usually what you want to do is highlight a particular aspect, a simple story. So maybe you’d highlight one row of that table and describe why it was significant.
This guy said “I’ll just let you read this”. People laughed at the joke. Then, slowly, it dawned on us that he was serious.
That’s where I took a coffee break so I don’t know if the talk went further downhill after that.
Church Lady
Like a lot of parents of college age kids, I opened a facebook account mostly to keep up with them. I love seeing their pictures and, when something is inappropriate, can ask them to untag themselves from the picture or delete a posting. I am paranoid about the stories I’ve heard of employers scouring the social network sites before making job offers, so I’m always looking at stuff they post from that aspect. I’ve also reconnected with a few friends I haven’t seen since high school and keep up with friends that live out of town. I’m just very careful about what I put up and try to hold personal info to a minimum.
matoko_chan
lawl, more like a gateway drug for a totalitarian capitalist oligarchy.
targeting YOU! with an endless stream of subliminal marketing perfectly matched to your demographic identity.
go dark while you can.
Laura W.
I posted this the last time we had this very same discussion (May 9th), but I’m all about Jung/archetypes/mythology right now, so you’ve been warned.
I will simply repeat this part, with which I fully concur, from my own personal experience over the years online and in watching and interacting with others who basically live online in various venues:
Plus, I just joined Facebook because Fuckhead hounded me for months, seemingly unable to live until I friended him. So last week I deactivated my account because it was boring and made me nervous and who cares who is playing what war game or likes some “If you were a woman, what era woman would you be?” quiz anyway? So Fuckhead posts that someone has defriended him and he wants to know who. The dude actually noticed a one digit drop in his friends numbers! (He has way more friends over there than here, needless to say.)
Because he did not even care enough to notice it was me who was missing, I reactivated my account and defriended him. And then I closed it again.
Good riddance. (Facebook, not Fuckhead. I can’t quit him.)
Poopyman
@jeffreyw:
I’m jealous. The only thing our hummingbird feeder has been good for so far this year is drowning a lot of ants.
Great caption, also!
General Egali Tarian Stuck
@jeffreyw: That is a fantastic photo jeffrey. Man, you have become a most excellent Hummingbird Photographer. Kudos dude. And Flickr is the best social network, we don’t need no Facebook for that.
William
@ruemara:
As a startup guy, I don’t deny that there are some greedy assholes. But there are a lot of perfectly fine people trying to build great products for their users.
I think we peaked in our asshole density shortly before the dot-com bubble burst. It turns out that, statistically, being an entrepreneur is rarely the path to riches, so a lot of the MBA-toting locusts went back to finance, where they could steal their way to a Porche much more quickly.
That’s especially true lately. Right now the median time from founding to exit (the point at which founders get the big bucks, generally sale or IPO) has gone up to 7 years, from 2-3 during the bubble:
http://www.angelblog.net/images/Venture_Capital_Exit_Times.gif
That means that the people these days are generally in it for the long haul, which puts the assholes at a much bigger disadvantage. Putting up for a couple of years with a fuckhead boss and his dysfunctional company might be doable if you’ll make a pile at the end. But 5-10 years? Forget it. Even if said jerk could keep the dysfunctional company together for that long, which he probably can’t.
matoko_chan
and……think about what i said…..if my stalker could find me, access my page, and repeatedly post my addr and cell number and also that i was a whore and a slut (yup, an ex-bf), certainly a college admissions department or a prospective employer or an opposition research team could access the same information my stalker did.
Randy P
@Laura W.:
A problem for a people-pleaser like me is that I hate to turn down friend requests. I used to agonize about that decision and try to keep the list to a handful. Part of the problem is I wonder what sort of feedback you get if a friend request is denied.
Finally I decided the hell with it. If I knew who it was and had no particular reason to say no, I say yes. I still get plenty of requests from people that I have no idea who they are. I assume that’s via the high-school connection.
Punchy
@twiffer: /looks around
who, me? Online? Pfffffttt. Never. We play the old-school board game, sometimes the SuperScrabble version, but love the travel size setup with the small plastic snap in tiles. We actually go to bars, order beers, then whip out the game. Young ‘ens probably think we’re undercover cops or something.
Silver Owl
facebook, myspace, twitter, blogs all serve a purpose in allowing people to socialize.
I got on facebook for friends and family, stayed because of Mafia Wars. One thing about facebook is they always error on the side of annoying the user in order to give advertising companies another gateway to bombard people.
Companies haven’t given a crap about customer privacy for decades. Selling phone numbers, low security on credit card information are examples prior to the internet.
flukebucket
@matoko_chan:
Fuck it. Just stencil “666” to your forehead and be done with it.
LarsThorwald
I came in just to applaud the Dandy Warhols ref in the title.
celticdragonchick
I don’t put anything on Facebook that I don’t want viewed by everybody.
I assume whatever goes on Facebook gets published to the world at large. Private info stays off Facebook.
No Facebook means no Mafia Wars. That would suck.
matoko_chan
what guarantee do you have that fb admins ever really delete your data when they finally delete your page?
they own your data once you give it to them.
Cyrus
@jibeaux: I agree. Not about the “I like FB” part (I have it, but hadn’t used it much since I graduated five years ago and recent news has me using it even less), but about comparisons to the Constitution.
@ChockFullO’Nuts:
Why? Any actual argument for that besides assertion? I’d disagree with you. First of all, it’s deceptive to look at the length of the Constitution without counting the Bill of Rights (they were ratified around the same time, and it wouldn’t have been ratified without them), like the NYT did in their comparison. Second of all, it’s apples and oranges. The Constitution is (or at least it was, or at least it is in theory…) a limitation on the power of government. A one-way set of limitations, a contract putting almost all the burden on one of the parties to the contract. You couldn’t get any corporation to agree to that without a quid pro quo, today or in 1787. And it assumes a great deal of power is held by other parties. That keeps things far, far, far simpler than a Constitution written for a modern America could possibly be.
You know what else has more words than the constitution? The World of Warcraft Terms of Use. Also, the examples of short privacy policies in the NYT article are misleading. The shortest it lists, for example, is the Flikr privacy policy. But look that up and it tells you to that you are also subject to the Yahoo! Terms of Service (5,636 words) and the Yahoo! Community Guidelines (226 words). And there’s also a link to Yahoo!’s own privacy policy (1,367 words), but I’m not sure if that applies to Flikr users or not. (Do you know?)
DZ-015
Will harvest or plow. Will harvest or plow…
Facebook is insidious.
Poopyman
@Laura W.:
Literally busted out laughing here in my cubicle. You’ve got my vote for winning the thread.
KevinNYC
@JR: Yup, I thought the same thing.
If it was told off the record, he violated that.
Cris
It’s trivial. It looks like something that can be thrown together in a weekend.
JD Rhoades
@cleek:
I’m a lexulous man myself.
catclub
@ruemara:
“I have very customized privacy settings and figured those out within the first month on FB, because I’m paranoid like that. If it blew up tomorrow, I’d be fine.”
Even if you set your privacy settings as you liked them once, doesn’t FB sound like the kind of organization that will do an upgrade and ‘accidentally’ unset them to wide open?
Silver Owl
@celticdragonchick:
Nah, you can play Mafia Wars at http://www.mafiawars.com. Full screen, no ads being loaded that screw up game loading. The gifting still reverts back to the facebook app but I figure they’ll address that soon enough.
Quackosaur
As an infrequent user of Facebook, I’ve always been a little skeptical about the “OMG, Facebook iz stealing my identitiez!” rants coming from certain sectors of the Internet. If you don’t want people seeing/knowing stuff about you, why are you putting it on the Internet?
I’ve been on Facebook since mid-2005, you know, back when you had to have an .edu e-mail address to get on, and it hadn’t been rolled out at every school yet. Everyone waited impatiently to get their school e-mail addresses so they could sign-up. You had your school network, and that was basically it. As far as I know, I’ve barely touched my privacy settings since then, so the only people who can see me are my friends and those on my network.
I’m sure a lot of this privacy hullabaloo stems from people joining these massive location networks that have no barriers to entry. Though I suppose a lot of people are more concerned with Facebook sharing their information with other commercial entities rather than random strangers finding them; at least you can supposedly block those.
Maybe I just miss the “good-old days” (ha!) from 5 years ago when Facebook wasn’t an open platform with all this application crap. Why is it that profit motives always ruin things that are good, or at least not bad?
jeffreyw
@General Egali Tarian Stuck: @Poopyman:
Thanks! General, I’ve seen yer hummers and they rock.
MikeJ
@Cris: That post would matter if I wanted to make money instead of wanting to play a game.
IndieTarheel
Never cared for it, won’t miss it.
__
OT, but watching Lewis Black eviscerate the Beckster never gets old.
Cris
@MikeJ: Well, I take Jeff’s point as being that it’s not so much about making money, it’s about making an application that people want to use. Creating the app is the easy part; getting it in front of other people who will want to play with you is the real work.
Especially the ones that allow random matchups. Zynga is absolutely evil in this regard. They are very successful at pushing their games to a broad audience, so the fact that their gameplay is not always the best doesn’t seem to matter.
Nimm
It is very trendy to hate on Facebook. The hate also happens to be reasonably justifiable, so it can be principled.
FB sort of falls into the same boat with Disney – you know that they’re evil, and exist for the sole purpose of squeezing as much money out of you as possible. But as long as you’re aware of that, they can make it easy to turn a blind eye to the evil.
I don’t love FB, and don’t use it that often – but I will keep my account open. It is a very convenient way to get an idea how the people that I’ve known in life are doing. I get to see pictures of their new babies, their kids’ graduations, their birthday parties…and I like having that. I’ve reconnected with old friends that got lost 20 years ago. I like that.
The execrable privacy policies need to be monitored closely, and maybe I don’t take it all seriously enough (although I do lock everything down pretty well), but honestly, if I just left everything open to all the public (i.e., advertisers and FB “partners”)….there’s probably about a 99% chance that my life would not change one iota. Locking the info down reduces that already small chance even further. So, the privacy stuff is annoying, as is knowing that I’m a consumer whose information is being mined, but…the small benefits that FB provides still outweigh the negligible cost of being mined for demographic data.
I’m sure I’ll end up eating those words somehow, though.
ChockFullO'Nuts
@Nimm:
See, that’s the real value of FB. A place where you can break connections and make enemies. Let the animosity flow, piss people off.
My kind of place. For that, I will put up with their shitty software.
Laura W.
@Poopyman:
Fuckhead: My favorite foil and fodder.
Nobody better.
;-)
(Where the hell is BOB, speaking of favorites? I was very unfond of his latest sub-personality – what a wreck! – so I hope he brings the old puppet back.)
MikeJ
@Cris: Again, that would matter if I cared about other people.
catclub
Open Facebook Alternatives Gain Momentum, $115K
Not quite offtopic.
http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2010/05/facebook-open-alternative/comment-page-1/
Cris
@MikeJ: Okay then. I think solitaire Scrabble sucks.
Pete
@zzyzx: Man, if you’re going to keep posting about Phish, can you just change your handle to “zzzzz”?
(*snap!*)
General Egali Tarian Stuck
Turned on MSNBC for a few minutes, first time the teevee has been on all week, and the asshole who authored the AZ Jim Crow laws on banning ethnic studies was saying basically there was no racism in this country and his motive was the one that racists give all the time, that saying there is racism is racism in itself. This is the cretin who also inspired the iIlegal Immigrant racial profiling law, that polls tell us 2/3 Americans support and about the same number agree it will lead to racial profiling, but support it anyways. We are a deeply screwed up country in many ways in how we treat one another, while all the while claiming pride in diversity and fair treatment. It is a lie, and unfair to single out Arizona. They just took the step that most of the country wants. Sometimes I wonder if we are on the greasy skid toward going the way of the Romans, and nothing will stop the slide. Or, why bother. You can’t hold back the wind, nor tide. I am in a really bad mood about this country right now, and it’s time to tune it out for awhile.
Randy P
@Laura W.:
Yeah, who else is going to tell us about the Seven Liberal Arts and how the poor should be able to survive on nothing but potatoes? Cooked in brick ovens presumably?
I think his pro-slavery comment finally pushed John over the brink into permanently banning him.
I kind of miss BoB’s particular brand of incoherent loony also.
Malron
The best defense against Facebook is to add as little information as possible to your account. I have been on Facebook since November 2007 and I’ve lost count of how many times they’ve “updated” their security settings. The worst part about their updates is they wipe out all your old settings and force you to redo them all from scratch. If you’re offline at the time they issue their changes – they don’t notify you of the changes until AFTER they’ve made them – it might be days before you realize your information has been exposed to all.
mikey
I don’t understand the question. If you had something you wanted to keep private, why on earth would you post it on the internet. The contradiction is mind boggling…
mikey
Laura W.
@Randy P: I miss his pull-apart cinnamon buns. And his views on women drivers, fat people, and Coexist bumper stickers.
Warren Zevon and Indigo Girls references.
Red jug wine reviews.
Fluctuating cost of mozzarella updates.
/wistful
ruemara
@catclub:
I fuss with things constantly, every time they update settings, I’ve never seen my stuff changed but I have gone on & investigated the new settings. Plus, Nothing I’ve Ever Said On The Internets Is Something I Would Hold Back On. To your face. With Malice Aforethought.
Maude
@Malron:
It’s also the Wednesday glitch that sparked concern.
To change privacy setting and then tell the users and make it more difficult to re set them is unethical
I am going to wait for the open alternative and then post it where I tech. My end users are young and don’t know the ins and outs of all this.
Some people get very confused when dealing with settings on a computer and no wonder.
electricgrendel
I don’t really care if the world knows I’m a fan of Amy’s Ice Cream. I also do not see some grand conspiracy in people knowing I live in Austin, TX. Facebook has reconnected me with at least thirty people I had been wanting to speak with for years. I understand if there are problems with privacy, but a lot of this is much ado about nothing. Do you really care if people know which bands you like? Is this seriously super secret and dangerous information which will be used to lure you into the gulags? I think there are legitimate concerns for privacy of some information (like email address, for instance.) However, a lot of the information that has the veneer of privacy stripped away from it by Facebook is simply useless internet garbage.
Shinobi
But I haven’t thought of you lately at all….
I still like facebook more than myspace.
Pete Guither
I love Facebook.
As a university professional, I have hundreds of former students that I really want to keep in touch with, but don’t have the time to keep up with their changing email addresses, etc. FB solves that. I get to find out when they’ve landed a new role on a TV series, or when they’re performing in a show in Chicago.
It helps me keep track of all sorts of events, and easily promote my own events. When I take pictures of the theatre productions at the university, I can share them on facebook for all the students, designers, parents, etc. to see.
I don’t accept friend requests from people I don’t know, I hide all the Farmville crap, and I don’t share what I don’t want people to know (but I also really don’t much care what people know – any employer that wouldn’t want to hire me because of what I posted on Facebook is an employer I don’t want to work for).
Facebook is also a great help to my DrugWarRant.com blog. I have a page for the blog on Facebook, and automatically import all the blog posts to that page, giving me a dramatically increased set of viewers who get notified about new blog posts through their news feed. And I can do very targeted advertising specifically to those who would like my blog, in order to reach more people.
If you don’t like Facebook, don’t use it. Wishing for it to blow up is just… mean.
Chuck
Funny how some people jealously guard some information and not others.
[email protected]
There. It’s not like you could spam me more than what already goes into my spam folder. Plus I have more than an average amount of power to strike back at spammers, and I’ll leave it there. Can someone from that cryptic comment tell where I work and what I do? Not that hard, but it’ll take more than a simple google (my name is common as dirt). Do I want social networking sites mining my profiles across the web and broadcasting it for every idle searcher? Not unless I tell them to.
maus
@Chuck: http://www.spokeo.com/email/search?e=cja987%40gmail.com
http://www.spokeo.com/email/search?e=cja987%40yahoo.com
http://www.spokeo.com/search?q=%22charles%20Adams%22#Seattle,%20WA
I’m not going to internet detective you any further, because deletion of posts is problematic.
You do not care what happens to your information. While naive, other people do not want their public records AND internet life mashable together, especially with how these are all being archived, centralized, and sold off.
I used to help run a large website, as with the scale, there were inevitably mentally ill people who came across it, harrassed the users, and when banned, took action against the administrators. I have a friend who received death threats by phone. All because a series of links were exposed that we were not aware of.
When I’m AWARE of my information being made public against my will, and that the owners of a site are being promiscuous with information i had previously only shared due to the assumption of privacy, I’m going to be pissed off. It’s an issue of control.
Cackalacka
@zzyzx:
Asheville. Definitely hotness.
And allow me to thank you a million times over for the Stats page.
I was able to compile the shows I saw up to and shortly after Coventry, but alas, some of the objects in the rear view mirror have faded pretty far back.
That said, thank you thank you thank you. That stat page is the reason the internet was invented. Well, that and porn.
Cackalacka
@zzyzx:
Asheville. Definitely hotness.
And allow me to thank you a million times over for the Stats page.
I was able to compile the shows I saw up to and shortly after Coventry, but alas, some of the objects in the rear view mirror have faded pretty far back.
That said, thank you thank you thank you. That stat page is the reason the internet was invented. Well, that and porn.
The Main Gauche of Mild Reason
Ehh, being part of the generation who’s reconnected with old friends for dating via facebook, I find it difficult to criticize. I just turn off all the advertisement settings and don’t put anything on there I wouldn’t want strangers to have.
Catsy
All the “if you don’t want your information shared with everyone, don’t put it on the internet” contrarians are either being disingenuous or haven’t thought it through. It’s like saying “if you don’t want your money stolen, don’t put it in the bank”.
There are thousands of legitimate purposes for which the internet can be used that involve storing your personal information in a form in which you have a reasonable expectation of it being kept private. When you sign up for phone or cable or power or cell or any other sort of service, nine times out of ten your information is now accessible online–with the right credentials. And most web sites–this one included–have functionality built in to restrict who can access certain content that you have provided to it, up to and including the IP address and host from which you did so.
And that’s really the key. When I store information on the internet that I want to share only with a select few people, I put it behind a layer of security. When I friends-lock a post on LJ, I have a reasonable expectation that malfunction or malice will not expose that content to people I have not chosen as part of that group–assuming you have the correct credentials. When I moved into this house and opened a utility account with Puget Sound Energy, my personal information became accessible through their web site–assuming you had the correct credentials. When I took a job with an IT company, my personal information became accessible to anyone on the internet–assuming they have the credentials I use to access my corporate account remotely.
Enough with the “if you don’t want your information public don’t put it on the internet” douchebaggery. What Facebook does is deliberately exploit the ignorance and laziness of the average person in order to mine personal information. It is transparently and egregiously in bad faith. It should offend anyone who actually gives a shit about privacy rights at all, regardless of whether or not you have a Flickr (Yahoo) account or sign up for a cell phone.
Derek
@LarsThorwald:
Same, but you beat me to it.
maus
@Catsy: The other problem is the false expectations provided by Facebook in the first place, the overused metaphor of the frog in the pot of water.
If people knew about these current plans, they would not have signed up for Facebook and a competitor would have snatched up the market. Instead, they’ve been rapidly eroding the privacy policies put in place, and not allowing you to EVER fully remove the information mined and archived under the previous policies, where you had the expectation that privacy was (more) guaranteed.
birthmarker
@William: But that’s the point. I don’t have any friends on facebook. I did pick a couple of pages I liked, but there is no reason for anyone to have my real email address. The only connection is that the fake email and the real email are both through yahoo. The whole thing was set up for lurking a bit with 100% fake info.
maus
@birthmarker:
They spidered your yahoo mail account for contacts.
http://www.facebook.com/find-friends/ is the tool they do it with.
EthylEster
@General Egali Tarian Stuck wrote: I don’t use FB, twitter, or anything but blogs. The internet is slowly becoming an accurate snapshot overall of American thoughts from most walks of life. And the picture is not all that pretty imo. I can hardly read most blogs comment sections anymore, left or right, and even this one is getting more difficult by the day.
I agree with this completely.
However, YOU are one of the reasons I read the comments here less and less. Ever consider just shutting the fuck up for a while?
EthylEster
@Laura W. quoted herself saying: Increasingly, the ability to deeply listen is succumbing to the need to loudly speak and to instead insist on being heard.
Bravo.
Stuck: read and reflect.
slag
Ditched Facebook as soon as they hired Alberto Gonzales’ henchman as one of their laywers: http://valleywag.gawker.com/5056365/facebook-hires-alberto-gonzaless-former-chief-of-staff. Writing, meet Wall. Facebook Wall.
JR
I’m a live-and-let-live kinda guy — hell, I’m damn near a pacifist. I truly wish the best for most of humanity.
But if Mark Zuckerberg got flattened by a bus tomorrow, I’d have a difficult time mustering up any sadness for humanity’s loss. Given that he’s a smug, self-satisfied Randian, he would do the same for me. Unlike me though, I’m not sure he’d be able to empathize with anyone.
Just Some Fuckhead
Geez, who cares about Facebook compromising yer privacy when Laura W. is writing a tell-all book in the comments?
Chuck
@maus:
I’m actually agreeing with you — the point I’m making is that different people feel the need to keep different pieces of information private. Now since I’ve stuck to a single email address that I’ve never bothered to keep private, this probably does lead to quite a bit of information about me.
The point I’m getting at is that I had control over releasing it on this particular forum — otherwise it would have been significantly more work to get the info on me, requiring manual detective work that doesn’t lend itself to automated data mining. Like I said, google returns way too much noise to find me apart from all the others with my name.
(Not sure if you plugged in Seattle yourself, but I don’t live there.)
birthmarker
@maus: Thanks for the info. But once again, I never filled out this form or gave them any kind of ok to dig through anything. Period. Unless it’s buried in tons of legalese somewhere that none of us read.
maus
@Chuck:
Hah, apparently if it doesn’t know offhand, it just plugs in what it thinks the area is. I didn’t bother verifying past the peripheral, nor did I really want to pull up that much, more of a proof of concept.
I’m sure you agree with me, but my point is that one piece of information is linked to other “verified” pieces of information, and it seems like we can no longer trust that changing screen names and usernames is enough to properly guard ourselves from ending up with one semi-unified internet profile.
Derek
Went through my privacy settings on Facebook again, just to be sure. I saw a couple of things I hadn’t blocked or disabled yet. Fixed now. I think my shit is pretty secure.
Sister Inspired Revolver of Freedom
There are those among us, disabled and housebound, for whom social networking sites are a literal godsend. So, despite the dangers, I will continue on Facebook.
Stan
Do not worry about Facebook. They are opening an office where online companies go to die. They won’t even be around in twenty-four months.
http://www.kvue.com/news/Facebook-Launches-in-Austin-87480752.html