Slashdot Mirror
Social Network Users Have Ruined Their Privacy
Steve Kerrison writes "'There's little point in worrying about ID cards, RFID tags and spyware when more and more people are throwing away their privacy anyway. And the potential consequences are dire.' I've written an article on the dangers of social networks and how many users seem to forget just how public the information they post can be. This follows a warning sent out by the CS department of Bristol University, advising students that they risk lost job opportunities, getting in trouble with their parents and more, if they don't take care. The warning, however, really applies to all social network users, be they college students or over-zealous blog posters."
puh... close one, I was born in 1989... but seriously, a lot of my friends at school are pretty stuck in this social networking thing. One girl at school even flew to aberdeen to date someone she met over myspace... I am so glad I hate myspace... After reading a book called "crypto" by Steven Levy, and reading about Diffie and Zimmerman made me realize how precious privacy really is. I am not as private as I could be, I gave my website URL to slashdot, and on my website I have my real name somewhere, and on other websites I am not nearly as private as I should be, but I am not telling every schmoe out on the internet what I did last weekend.
ugh...
> advising students that they risk lost job opportunities
Strange. When I seek for jobs I worry much more about employers not knowing me enough rather than they know me too much. And no employer will be bored enough to actually read every message in your blog to find your "most silly moment" before he decides whether to hire you.
Erosion of privacy is when personal details about your life are taken from you. It's when police chiefs talk about tapping everyones home or looking up library records without a warrant. If I willfully give away information about myself then I never did consider it very private then, did I? This crap about lost opportunities, while perhaps partially true in today's freakishly religious climate, will not be such an issue as these things become more common. This is absolute proof that the minority voice controls the world. Damn near everyone has to lie about who they are because they're afraid everyone else lives some higher "moral" standard and will look down on them. This is simply not true. Even the noisy types who push this false sense of morality on us hardly practice what they preach. As a global community develops and communication with the entire world becomes simple and cheap the world will shift as knowledge becomes free. You will no longer have to worry about losing your job because there is a picture of you with a joint on someones myspace page or your hair is dyed neon blue. The transition period will not be smooth, but I welcome the day. All this article does is beg us to continue living in fear of some invisible and nonexistent moral majority. I, for one, refuse.
It is already happening. The company I work for was founded by two young entrepreneurs that grew up in the age where knowledge was free and they learned that masturbation won't cause hair to grow on your hands or your dick to fall off. They learned that the D.A.R.E. cop that told them the story of the young man who died from ONE hit from a joint was LYING. They realized that nobody else they grew up with believed this horseshit anymore either. They only care about your skill and your work ethic. As the younger generations start to take back this world it will become a better place to live because of the global community and available, simple worldwide communication.
Do not fear it. Embrace it.
That's true - unless social networking is being set up as a sort of honey trap encouraging people to compromise their futures. Hence, I would not stress this difference as a dichotomy - but rather as two moments of the same phenomenon.
People are giving away their freedom within a now-corporate framework that encourages this kind of activity. Just remember that.
As with fidelity/client cards, purchase-rewards, and fast-tracking at airports, the web 2.0 is training us to surrender our personal lives for the most meager of rewards. This kind of surrender almost seems propaedeutic for a greater, involuntary loss of privacy. But then again, Americans have already lost their freedom to credit reports.
But reading the quote, one wonders who is this Andrew Jallon guy. Well, a quick google and you can see check out his discus and shotput attempts (not very good). PUBLIC real-estate tax records give a strong implication as to where he lives. And finally, Andrew Jallon's bigoted comments end up on Slashdot. Did he expect this? Should he have expected it. Should we all be paranoid about every post...lest someone take it and run?
It's hard to create safeguards when we're not even sure of all the negatives.
I remember before there were consumer protection laws, and if you bought a defective car, too bad sucker. That was the way for years. Am I going to argue that all safeguards are an infringement? No. Am I going to argue that we're figuring it out? Yes.
Please don't apply simple "take personal responsibility for the fact the world sucks and hates you" rules. We can make it better, but we have to know what's wrong first.
It's nice once in a while to talk about what's right, but, yeah, that's not nearly as sexy and frightening.
The generation that went to college in the era of Facebook/Myspace already expects to be able to find drunken ramblings and absurd photos of themselves and their friends online. This generation thinks less of a person who has a web presence that indicates no social life. Who wants to work with a boring person? Once these people are in charge of hiring (another 10-15 years) this won't be seen as a bad thing for many companies.
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
As a parent, I was blissfully unaware of the dangers of myspace. Having gottent the general idea of how stupid and pointless it was, I never bothered to visit. Of course, I have repeatedly informed my children of the danger of carrying on conversations with total strangers. So I thought I was covered. Bu the other day, out of curiosity I checked myspace to see if my stepson had an account. It turns out he did, but that the profile was private. Now, I would guess that his profile was private because he doesn't want us (his parents) to see, not because he doesn't want some stranger to see. He probably has all kinds of inappropriate stuff on his myspace page that we would get upset about, so he has it private. This is just a guess, but the fact that he has a picture of himself wearing only boxer shorts on his front page, with a description of himself as a wrestler and his interests as looking to meet people on the internet pretty much means that everything we have told him he has pretty much thrown away and done the opposite.
Now I am sure that a legitimate operation like myspace properly notifies parents that their underage child wants to create an account and automatically grants the parent full access, so I am sure they will be sending me that information shortly.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
If they care that much about me being a sarcastic ass on usenet in college, maybe it's not my kind of job, is it?
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"
Gee, he's warning kids that if they post on myspace, then the older generation (parents and future employers) might disapprove. Of course, the kids don't care, and why should they? They don't WANT to live in the same culture as their parents. Personally, I find the myspace culture to be preferable to the older culture. With everybody's flaws exposed on the internet, people will learn to be more tolerant of others' shortcomings, and tiny mistakes and personality quirks will no longer seem scandalous. (For example, do you remember the Howard Dean scream? Why should something like that disqualify somebody from the presidency?) The older generation is just a bunch of stuck-up, blissfully ignorant whiners, who are upset that their children aren't conforming to their expectations.
http://xkcd.com/c137.html
Ignoring, more or less, your pugnacious tone, your argument seems to boil down to the claim that revealing passwords, PINs, etc., or things (such as your SSN) that are effectively used as such, is somehow equivalent to revealing the sort of personal information (sexual orientation, political affiliation, taste in music, and so on and so forth) that people might reveal on MySpace. And further, you somehow assume that anyone who does things that I won't do for you on demand must lack the "ability to reason in a logical fashion" or be "an utter idiot."
I of course beg to differ.
Your first point is clearly nonsense (a claim you can easily disprove by providing links to a few dozen publicly available MySpace pages with SSN's, bank account numbers, PINs, and the like).
On your second point I would claim that anyone who would reveal password-class information to a person like you, on an open web forum or not, would be the utter idiot. On the other hand, I have no qualms about telling you that I'm a fiscally conservative life-long registered Republican who voted a straight Democratic ticket in the last election because I'm tired of seeing our country run into the ground by a pack of clueless morons, no matter which party they ran under. I like classic rock and some modern stuff, but can't stomach more than a little rap or new age. And so on and so forth.
In case you still don't get it, the point of being "effectively immunized" is to not live as if you have any personal secrets that you wouldn't tell your boss / parents / spouse anyway. If you're going to prance about in undergarments that aren't gender appropriate, put up a web site detailing the whys and wherefores, and then if anyone tries to blackmail you by threatening to "out" you say "Oh good! Give them my URL while you're at it; I could use more page hits" and that is pretty much the end of it.
--MarkusQ