Is Tide of Privacy War Turning Against Facebook?
May 14th, 2010 § 2 Comments
A series of articles in the NY Times and elsewhere are being written about the increasing disgust of people for Facebook’s privacy policies. Apparently, a bewildering tangle of options are needed in order to set one’s privacy configuration in your own profile. What is more, a group of 4 nerds in NYC have launched a cry to arms against Facebook, promising to develop a social network called Diaspora* that will not need users to surrender their privacy to be sold to third parties.
Whether this is going to be the beginning of a long battle for the holy grail of social network dominance or simply just another trifling spark against the giant it remains to be seen. What it is clear is that a social clamor is mounting up for their most basic instincts in search of privacy protection. The proof is that Diaspora* has been raising funds for this new venture in Kickstarter and 18 days to go for closing of this round they have already been promised 1273% of the money they asked initially.
Perhaps there are now clear signs that cyberusers are getting tired of being imposed rules by the big monopoly or simply they just would like to see new blood providing more self-control options. It is clear though that the battle for personal privacy in the web continues and that the Tide of War might be turning against Facebook. What it is not so clear though is how all this will affect the end user.
I don’t want privacy to be dead
February 16th, 2010 § 1 Comment
“Privacy is dead. Get over it”. People who have famously said this or something similar include Scott McNealy (CEO Sun Microsystems), Eric Schmidt (CEO Google) and Mark Zuckerberg (Founder of Facebook).
Some of the reasons that justify why not having privacy is OK include “if you do something that you want nobody to know, maybe you should not do it on the first place” or “people are ever more comfortable with sharing information about themselves”.
These arguments are all well and good. However, the other side of the coin is when personal information is used by strangers to take advantage of the person, let alone potential misinterpretations or simply gossip.
Is this interconnectedness worth exchanging for personal privacy? ‘Clever’ algorithms are constantly crawling the web in search of personal information. The degree to which these algorithms are more effective at spamming you is proportional to the amount of public information about you on the web.
Have you ever said anything or joined an internet group you would rather not join now? Unfortunately it is likely that this information will never disappear. Even if you delete it from your profile, it is probable that some web crawling algorithm has stored that information somewhere.
It has only been until recently when users have a tighter control over the information they make available to the web in Facebook for instance. Default settings are indeed terrifying in terms of the information of one’s profile made available to search engines.
Despite the possibility of being able to control how much information one makes public, this is not the end of the story: I have found situations where pieces of information in my profile were picked by a friend without me knowing it. True, it is specified in the settings how much you want to make public. Nevertheless, even though I have unselected information from my public profile, who knows who would have looked at it.
Not that I have anything to hide but I would rather keep quiet about my personal interests rather than sharing them widely. Surely a better knowledge of my personal profile could facilitate the way to finding more easily passwords and even breaking into my bank account.
Have we now reached a point of no return in privacy?
Probably.
Me & Facebook: A Personal Account
January 11th, 2009 § Leave a Comment
Everyone is raving about Facebook. Some of its much praised functionality includes its capacity for managing one’s personal network of contacts, its capabilities for viewing images and text in real time and even providing the ability of viewing other people’s contacts. Groups can also be created, ranging from political, cultural and reivindicative causes (e.g. “Stop Terrorism”), from the most charitable to the most selfish and rude.
Some of the stories told about Facebook are positive, but others are very frightening. For example, I heard the story of an employee who spoke his mind about his boss on another people’s wall, only to discover that the boss himself was on his contact list and was able to see what he wrote. This person ended up being fired.
My Facebook life started once I got enough invitations from friends to join in. Only then I reluctantly decided to register. At the beginning it was boring and I did not pay much attention to it. As I got more and more contacts, I started to become more interested in it. I spent quite a lot of time choosing the appropriate profile picture (I even got comments praising my cool self-portrait!) and I wrote an attractive description of my personal life. It was a sure way to show my growing network of “friends” how “cool” I was…
Unfortunately many of my real friends were either not interested in joining or did not even have an email account themselves, let alone Facebook membership. Yet my list of so-called friends continued to grow steadily. Then a competition began and people started to measure who had the greatest number of contacts, as well as receiving invitations to install new applications that did really unusual things.
Although I consider myself a techie, the truth is that I never managed to find a lot of usefulness in the extra add-on bits of applications that other people were increasingly inviting me to join in. At some point in time I decided that I would stop having only people I know. My “friends” had started to add celebrities to their contact list even though there was little chance they knew them.
Even if these celebrity contacts were not the real person, at least it would look good to have them on my own list, I decided. Soon I started inviting celebrities from my contacts’ lists, profiles like the ex-president of Spain or some of the main politicians I follow up closely. Now, I thought, I would be able to get to know them or even they would know me!
At this point I started to check Facebook daily and became formally addicted to it. I even decided to start my own blog (the one you are reading now) and update my Facebook status with a link to my blog article every time I wrote one. My blog stats did go up significantly, but the overall impact was disappointing. No famous guy from my contact list ever approached me.
Everything started to go downhill for me when Facebook decided to update their interface into a newer version. I did not like it that much, but it was okay. I was not going to protest for the new interface like many people did in a Facebook group themselves. However, I started to receive more and more irrelevant news about people who would write on my celebrities’ walls and messages that were a load of rubbish. As I joined more and more groups, I also began to get too many invitations that I was not really interested in.
As time goes on I feel more and more reluctant to put personal details on my Facebook account. I fear some clever hacker could take my personal information and use it to fool my bank and get my credit card details. I try hard not to disclose any personal information and have erased a lot of what I previously had in my profile. I still worry though about this because some of my personal data may be recorded somewhere I do not know.
For me the most worrying thing about Facebook is the lack of control I have on who gets to see the information I put up. True, I am responsible for it because first I have to add the person to my contacts. However, a real friend one day joked with me about something I wrote once in Facebook and felt a bit embarrassed. He was able to see something I had preferred to keep private. At the time it was not made clear to me that what I wrote would be visible by my entire network of contacts. Although I did not say anything that was rude, I did feel that perhaps I should not have written it.
Luckily for me I am going off Facebook these days. I do think it is a brilliant idea, and I even have joined the development side of it. I am really interested to learn how this technology works from the inside-out. One day I might even start my own business using Facebook as a platform to bring together people sharing similar genes in their genome. (By the way if you are interested to collaborate with me on this idea please drop me a line!) Anyhow it will be interesting to see whether Facebook is able to constantly reinvent itself like Google has done or it declines victim of its own success.
