The Implications of a Facebook Society

FloatsomNJetsom writes "The site Switched.com is taking a look at the slow death of privacy at the hands of social media sites such as Facebook and MySpace with a link to a report on the creepy practice of Facebook employees monitoring what pages you look at and a thought-provoking video interview with social media expert Clay Shirky — who says that social networks are profoundly changing our ability to keep our private lives private. 'Eventually, Shirky theorizes, society will have to create a space that's implicitly private even though it's technically public, not unlike a personal conversation held on a public street. Otherwise, our ability to keep our lives private will be forever destroyed. Of course, that might already be the case.'"

Comments

Private Lives Private

[srollyson]

I don't think that sites like Facebook are "profoundly changing our ability to keep our private lives private." Rather, they're changing our ability to make our public lives more public. This is an important distinction, since these social sites make it quite clear by design that you are sharing your information with your friends and acquaintances. If people really wanted to keep the fact that they got smashed and rode horseback on their friend private, they'd just open up notepad and type away. Instead, they decide to broadcast that on a social website so their friends can see their drunken antics. Don't take this to mean that I condone the practice of Facebook employees (or gov't agents for the tin-foil hat crowd) browsing private profiles. There is an implication of semi-privacy if I set my profile to be viewable by friends only. If a potential employer sees Johnny McDrunkeverynight's public pictures and decides not to hire Johnny, fine. Maybe he shouldn't have used the megaphone (social websites) to broadcast his machismo.

Re:Private Lives Private

[trolltalk.com]

... or people need to start using pgp /gpg, and social networking platforms need to incorporate such technology more transparently into their sites.

Re:Private Lives Private

[djasbestos]

I think it's important for users (and developers) of such sites to keep in mind that most people want only a limited degree of visibility. Like you said, people do want to share those drunken escapades with their friends, but not necessarily with strangers, or worse, employers, or worse, mom and dad.

So it's perhaps prudent to give control over the visibility of content, but at the same time, I think people need to realize that a person's MyFace page is not necessarily descriptive of them in every environment or context. Most people behave differently at work than they do with close friends. And being a lawfully drunk weirdo on your own time doesn't really bear much on your professional life unless you show up hungover. Which could happen either way.

My point: people should not take these sites too seriously.

Re:Private Lives Private

[kieran]

While it's true that people are foolishly publishing information publicly that they could easily keep private, this is essentially a matter of poor user education. There are plenty of people on Facebook who simply don't understand the privacy implications of posting stuff on their profile, and the privacy setting defaults are wide open.

If we really want social networking to be acceptable to the world at large and to keep the scare stories under control, we need to do a better job of educating users and/or providing accounts with more suitable privacy settings.

Re:Private Lives Private

[Anonymous Coward]

privacy is overrated and overvalued. desire for privacy is motivated by largely baseless fears and insecurities.

Re:Private Lives Private

[CheechBG]

I came in here to say almost exactly this.

I think the paranoia of the "death to privacy" crowd is fueled simply because employers and other similar people are taking an more active interest in their prospective employee and their PUBLIC life. I caps public for the simple reason that once you post your 5,000 word essay on how you scored with the fat girl last night and you can't remember it because you had a Jim Beam IV drip, it moves from your private life (implied privacy due to the controlled dissemination (or lack thereof) of information, assuming the fat girl plays ball as well) to your public life and is not fair game to ridicule, reprimand, response by the other party (since if she implied privacy, you didn't hold up your end of the deal) or review by a neutral third party trying to gauge what kind of person you are. From a corporate perspective, it makes good business sense. I don't want to hire as a outside sales representative someone I know has demonstrated public displays of drunkenness and shenanigans. What if he forgets to take off a company supplied piece of clothing, and now his mugshot is displayed with my company logo? Or even better, someone who can't keep it in his(or her, not trying to be sexist) pants, brags about all the people they've slept with on FaceBook/MySpace, and opens a possibility for a sexual harassment suit?

Re:Private Lives Private

[Stretch Armstrong]

It's actually pretty well known that the government is watching and monitoring facebook (in response to tin hat people) the video linked shows how facebook is connected to the government. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZMWz3G_gPhU

Re:Private Lives Private

[Escogido]

social networking platforms won't bother with pgp etc. until there is enough demand for that. and somehow I doubt there will be enough demand in the nearest future.

we are waiting for a new world, made from people who know what to make public and what not to, because they are fully aware of consequences. the problems like those stated in the article are in my opinion merely transitional. once the new reality sets in, there will be unwritten laws on what to do / what to say / how to behave online, not unlike those we abide by in public IRL. until then, people will suffer for them not being careful and bitch about it. oh well.

Re:Private Lives Private

[Silver Sloth]

we need to do a better job of educating users Who's this 'we' who needs to do a better job of educating users? If you're saying that Computer Studies in school should concentrate far more on issues like this then I agree but the vast majority of users have left school and how exactly are 'we' or whomever, going to educate them.

It's exactly the same with malware protection, far too many users don't understand the risks in opening e-mail attachments or downloading 'free' wallpaper but there's no way to teach them, nor, in a non-totalitarian society, should there be. It's the price you pay for freedom - the freedom of illeducated users to operate computers.

Re:Private Lives Private

[ByOhTek]

There's only so much we can do to protect stupid people from themselves. Eventually we have to give up and let Darwinian selection take it's course.

Re:Private Lives Private

[ZombieWomble]

I think one of the big issues with the development of the social networking sites is that it's not always the person's decision to be featured on facebook - I don't have an account on facebook/myspace/etc, and yet I know there are numerous photos of me, labelled as such, on those sites, because I associate with people who do use them. It's not a big deal at the moment (the photos are only linked in the most tenous of ways, and none of them are particularly dodgy), but there is a potential there - even if someone isn't actually actively participating in such sites, there is likely to be information on them there.

There is the potential that, as social networking sites evolve, it may be possible to extract a non-trivial amount of information on a person simply from their associations with others, even if they choose not to add any additional facts to the mix.

I do agree that, at the moment, the majority of the people on these sites are being bitten in the ass by their own stupidity, but I don't think this necessarily holds in the future.

Re:Private Lives Private

[peragrin]

So it' like a girl who wants to have pornographic pictures taken of her for money, yet is all pissed off when her father buys that very magazine two months later.
My opinion. You want privacy, You want Only certain people to know certain things. you don't publish them on a website, you don't run around a bar with whomever doing stupid things.

In general the information on FAcebook/myspace/ etc is ultimately harmless, As those people will tell their co-workers eaactly what thy did anyways

Re:Private Lives Private

[plague3106]

Why should you care what your employees do privately? So he told people he got drunk and screwed a fat chic? So what? Maybe instead of concerning yourself with what-ifs, you should worry about what actually happens. People in your company right NOW could be doing those things, you just don't know about it.

You're not paying him when he's out partying so you should have zero say on how he conducts himself. If at some point he DOES do something stupid wearing your company logo, deal with it then. Although I don't see Nike getting upset when THEIR logo is worn by a some drunk college kid.

Re:Private Lives Private

[KiahZero]

Alternatively, we as a society could grow up and stop being gigantic hypocrites about our social lives.

The people taking the "corporate perspective" aren't any different than the people they're passing judgment on, but they'll do it anyway, because that's the current societal expectation. Hopefully, as more and more people start sharing more of their lives, these sorts of ridiculous expectations will go away, and we can all be more honest.

Re:Private Lives Private

[MoneyT]

Then you need to speak with the people you associate with about your expectations of privacy. It's not facebook's fault your friends are violating your privacy.

Re:Private Lives Private

[trolltalk.com]

> "privacy is overrated and overvalued. desire for privacy is motivated by largely baseless fears and insecurities."

... which is why you posted as an AC ... you have "baseless fears and insecurities"?

Since you think privacy is useless, why not install a webcam in your shower. After all, according to your premise, all the pedophiles out there should be able to see your kids "neked".

Pravacy has its uses - one being that people should have better things to do than snoop on other people's lives.

Re:Private Lives Private

[kieran]

We: Facebook, their friends, news sources, schools, whomever. I think I meant it as "the technical community".

In this particular case, the best positioned to do the work would be Facebook - but I'm not sure they have the incentive, as they may be best served by people leaving things public and open and social.

Re:Private Lives Private

[tlhIngan]

I think it's important for users (and developers) of such sites to keep in mind that most people want only a limited degree of visibility. Like you said, people do want to share those drunken escapades with their friends, but not necessarily with strangers, or worse, employers, or worse, mom and dad.

If we can't keep PRIVATE data private (think of all the data leaks - credit card, SSNs, etc), what makes you think we can keep PUBLIC data "somewhat private"?

Perhaps the operating motto should be "data leaks happen". If you want limited visibility to some event, spread the news in a limited fashion. Otherwise checking the box that reads "friends only" puts the trust into whatever's ensuring that. But some gizmo, gadget, geegaw, what-have-you that someone wrote might (accidentally, ignorantly, purposely) ignore that flag, and boom, it becomes public.

It isn't new. It isn't confined to these "social networking" sites. After all, if you do something stupid in public, you're counting on everyone around you keeping it quiet so it doesn't show up on YouTube in 5 minutes. Now you're counting on one of your friends also not passing on this to someone else? Sure that "someone else" may not be able to view the source material, at which point it becomes another telephone game. Or someone just saves the picture and emails it to everyone, and soon your boss has it in his inbox.

To control information dissemination, it requires control on all levels. Don't want the general public to see it? Don't post it. "Friends only" is still public, just you've applied a little bit of DRM on it.

Ah, maybe that's the solution. You'll have to DRM-protect all this "Friends only" stuff to keep it only between your friends and not your friend's friends (and so on). After all, DRM works great on music and movies...

Re:Private Lives Private

[GNUlancer]

Yeah? Wanna me watching you pooping at the toilet room? :) Or perhaps, eavesdropping when you talk with your buddy on G.Bush and politics and then getting you sued for conspiracy/terrorism/whatever? :D

Re:Private Lives Private

[Moderatbastard]

... which is why you posted as an AC ... you have "baseless fears and insecurities"?

Dude, look up and you'll see it. Apologies if you are a Dudess.

Re:Private Lives Private

[Captain Hook]

If people really wanted to keep the fact that they got smashed and rode horseback on their friend private, they'd just open up notepad and type away. Instead, they decide to broadcast that on a social website so their friends can see their drunken antics.

You get smashed, you don't type on you facebook about your antics, but you friend does and you share all same contacts, whats more, those contacts include people who are not necessarily friends but more acquitances, work colleagues etc.

Information has been passed to everyone you might know with out you doing anything to start that process off

I suppose you could argue that that situation is the same as having your friend talking to her friends about what happened but it's the scale and indiscriminate nature of who gets that information that kills privacy.

Re:Private Lives Private

[somersault]

Or don't write it down anywhere at all, obviously..

Some sites like deviantArt have all your browsing activity displayed by default anyway. There is the option to turn it off. And I fail to see the problem with knowing who has checked your own profile, especially if they are doing it repeatedly.

Re:Private Lives Private

[egburr]

There are a lot of professions where a person's private life does very often get associated with their work life, and their employer wants to control what gets associated with the company. Some examples are teachers and police officers. These people have very strict behavior requirements on the job. One very important quality is that their students and the general public respect them and trust them. Even when off duty, they often encounter people that they deal with as part of their job, and they have to maintain their on-the-job relationship. Since they can not predict when that may happen, that usually means "any time you are in a non-private location".

Theoretically, what you do on your own time is no business of your employer. Unfortunately, it can still affect your on-the-job performance. So, if you want to stay employed, you often have to restrict your off-the-job activities to either a very controlled private environment or to what is acceptable on-the-job.

My wife is in such a position, and while I understand her employers requirements, some of them chafe, and some of them I disagree with. But, she likes her job and for now at least is willing to abide by those restrictions in public.

Re:Private Lives Private

[apparently]

As far as I'm concerned, privacy is for liars and conspirators.

I don't know which is more appropriate:
+5 Batshit Insane
or
+5 Awesome Satire

Re:Private Lives Private

[Tony Hoyle]

Wouldn't bother me personally... as long as I could watch back.

'privacy' only works because everyone has it equally. If we all decide to give parts of it up (as facebook allows us to do) we get a more open society.

I did read a story where they theorized what would happen if privacy vanished altogether... IMO it was a bit utopian but the general principle (that pretty much what we use it for is to hide stuff we shouldn't be doing) was about right.

Re:Private Lives Private

[Tony Hoyle]

You get smashed, you don't type on you facebook about your antics, but you friend does and you share all same contacts, whats more, those contacts include people who are not necessarily friends but more acquitances, work colleagues etc.

Woo you got smashed and did stupid stuff. Like the rest of the population of the frikkin world... Everyone knows anyway. What do you think this revelation is going to do?

If facebook allows people to realize they are *not* somehow uniquely special then it's done a good thing.

Re:Private Lives Private

[keithjr]

I wish both this could be upmodded past 5. Just because people fail to realize they are operating in a public space does NOT mean their privacy has diminished. Failing to understand the ramifications of being part of a social networking site does not give one the excuse to call it "creepy." The very concept of social networking is to make information about yourself public.

What scares me is that before I graduated I'd overhear people at school saying things like "Facebook is what I use instead of email now." Wow.

"Never blame malice for what can adequately be blamed on stupidity" - R.Feynman

Re:Private Lives Private

[GNUlancer]

OK, you're right to some point, but this is all about Facebook staff and not other users. Let other users watch as long as they are not going to use gathered info in political/marketing ways. Two independent people on the net won't hurt each other, but if one of them represents an organization - this very well could happen.

Re:Private Lives Private

[Anonymous Coward]

Flamebait? This is +5 INFORMATIVE. I know Cheech and he was a massive nerd who was repeatedly turned down by fat girls!

I own you bitch!

Re:Private Lives Private

[Tony Hoyle]

That's the unequality thing again - it's counterbalanced by the fact that if a marketing company were to do something (don't know what) with my information I could very publically call them scumbags, and ultimately hurt their bottom line.

eg. if company X gets my (largely freely available) details and starts spamming me, I publically denounce them as spammers.. with evidence. Their ISP shuts down their email, they lose a lot of money.

Re:Private Lives Private

[sfmarco]

This is already getting realistic with Photo Tagging features; allowing users to identify other people on pictures.

Re:Private Lives Private

[foobsr]

we need to do a better job of educating users

Hmm: "Miss America calls for mandatory internet safety classes — Tells Congress she looked at dirty photos"

You are not alone.

CC.

Re:Private Lives Private

[GNUlancer]

Well, hehe, I'm more concerned of the possibility of governmental surveillance :) Sometimes it's being the biggest and the worst corporation around and there's no one to go complain to :(

Re:Private Lives Private

[plague3106]

So you state there are lots, and name two? And the second one having a much higher rate of things like domestic violence and corruption, and you think it matters if they get drunk once in a while? In small towns, yes, you can run into people you met at work, but even that is rare. In larger cities, its a non-issue.

I'm not sure why you brought up personal behavior that affects your job performance; I already clearly stated that is an issue the employer should handle (and the only time an employees personal life is relevent).

I can't imagine why anyone would accept a situation where their job affects their personal life, unless the pay is enough to cover that. Otherwise there's no reason to accept such an answer.

Re:Private Lives Private

[R2.0]

Step 1: Ask politely for the pictures to be removed.
Step 2: Ask forcefully for the pictures to be removed.
Step 3: Ask to see the signed model release that allows your image to be published.

Of course, this gets dodgy - are model reelases required for acts in a public space, and/r "publishing w/o profit?

Re:Private Lives Private

[heteromonomer]

Whatever anyone says or feels, there is a whole generation growing with very little value for privacy.

Re:Private Lives Private

[ObsessiveMathsFreak]

Step 3: Ask to see the signed model release that allows your image to be published.

Doesn't work like that. If it did, newspapers would need written permission from celebrities to publish their snapshots. Technically, your friends are "reporting the news" so they don't need your written permission.

Re:Private Lives Private

[cromar]

The flip-side of that is that there could be some unforeseen selection and the human race will have to become drunken Facebook users to survive...

Re:Private Lives Private

[tehcrazybob]

I did read a story where they theorized what would happen if privacy vanished altogether... IMO it was a bit utopian but the general principle (that pretty much what we use it for is to hide stuff we shouldn't be doing) was about right.

Would that have been "The light of Other Days" by Arthur C. Clarke and Stephen Baxter? If not, and if you enjoyed the one you read, I'd suggest you take a look. It manages to take a believable look at a situation most of us have never even imagined.

Re:Private Lives Private

[mgblst]

To be fair, I could upload pictures of you onto a website, and link them with your name. Next time someone searches for you in Google, these will come up. This is a far worse situation for you than being linked to on facebook.

And one can just imagine what sort of photos someone called Zombie Womble would have.

Re:Private Lives Private

[Fred_A]

Perhaps the operating motto should be "data leaks happen". If you want limited visibility to some event, spread the news in a limited fashion. There are two concepts here. One is getting into the public mind that "shit happens" which may or may no have gotten through (if they've gotten it maybe they're just into fucking stuff up for the money, given the amount of legal action based on "shit happens" that has taken place).

The other is that if Jane leaks her kinky pics to Joe, they could very well end up on a P2P network and from there on Usenet either because Joe can't setup his P2P software or because he's just being naughty. People, just like the media companies, have trouble coming to grips with the potential ubiquity of digital data.

(no jane, don't leak printouts, joe might have a scanner, didn't you learn anything ?)

Re:Private Lives Private

[henni16]

I don't know about the laws where you live, but in Germany the law is somewhat like:
if you are a "person of public interest" and you are in public, you have to live with papers publishing your public appearances.
HOWEVER if pictures concern your private life (e.g. family, friends) and you yourself haven't dragged your private life into the spotlight before, the publisher gets in trouble.

For example, try to find out how German chancellor Schroeder's teen-aged stepdaughter Klara (or the kid(s?) he adopted recently) looked - and compare that to how easy it is to find, for example, an old picture with Chelsea Clinton in it.
Same goes for spouses/children of some of Germany's showbiz celebs.

Re:Private Lives Private

[cayenne8]

"we are waiting for a new world, made from people who know what to make public and what not to, because they are fully aware of consequences. the problems like those stated in the article are in my opinion merely transitional. once the new reality sets in, there will be unwritten laws on what to do / what to say / how to behave online, not unlike those we abide by in public IRL. until then, people will suffer for them not being careful and bitch about it. oh well."

I dunno...the younger age group there, really does not understand or comprehend how their actions being published on the net can have LONG term consequences. It wasn't that long ago I was in that mode of mind, and when you are in the bulletproof years, you needn't worry about anything.

I think that publishing so called 'bad' behavior (hey, not saying it isn't fun), and all is a bit more glorified these days when you see the likes of Paris and Brittney...getting tons of attention and press for bad behavior. The trouble is, a kid that wants to emulate them, be famous for being famous, doesn't quite see that Paris and Brittney pretty much have unlimited funds available to them. They are wealthy, and do not have to worry about employment, or clearances later in life for good paying jobs.

In the past as a kid, if you got drunk and did something stupid (again, I didn't say it wasn't fun to pull shit like this)...you hoped it wasn't documented more than some pictures you could get the negatives too. YOu could outgrow these episodes, and heck, at the worst...MOVE away from them to another city.

But, what gets on the internet stays on the internet...potentially forever. For anyone to see.

That's just a little scary. A childhood bit of fun, that can harm you for the rest of your life. But, as a kid, you don't think that far ahead.

I think in the next 10 years when we really start seeing the results of this type of thing, we will see a lot of lives that can reach less that what they potentially could have, or more acceptance of a person's past behavior that was a bit childish.

If you think the latter, then ask yourself by today's politicians aren't more frank and public about their past 'drug' indescresions...since we are now starting to get well into the age ranks of people where very few are out there that never even tried any before ever. Nope...still taboo if you want to be in public office.

Re:Private Lives Private

[cayenne8]

"I'm not sure why you brought up personal behavior that affects your job performance; I already clearly stated that is an issue the employer should handle (and the only time an employees personal life is relevent)."

While agree that what an employee does on his own time SHOULD be 100% none of the employer's business, in reality, that is just NOT the case. I mean, we have employers out there firing people if they are caught smoking cigarettes for goodness sakes. And this is a perfectly legal activity!!

The intrusions of the job into the personal life isn't getting better, it is getting worse....and now, previously published 'behavior' might start keeping you from even getting the good paying job.

I'm not saying it is right, but, it is reality today....something to think on.

Re:Private Lives Private

[Fred_A]

What about the silent people who aren't on myface, Orkbook or whatever, don't even get the point of posting "mood : pouty" on the web (i.e. are above 14 yr old) ?

I've been on the web since there actually *was* a web, and on the networks as they were, the Internet and X25 and the BBSs for a number of years before that, and I *still* don't get the point of Facebook.

There are quite a number of people I know that can't look at MySpace without having their eyes watering (the googles, they do nothing !) so I presume I'm not alone in that situation.

Re:Private Lives Private

[R2.0]

I think the discussion would be enlightened by distinguishing between "privacy" and "anonymity".

A "private" act or utterance is, in and of itself, hidden. The universe of people who know about it, and the identity associated with it, is limited and controlled.

An "anonymous" act or utterance is PUBLIC, but the identity associated with it is hidden. So, when "True Colors", by Anonymous, was published, the Whole World knew that there was a person who had access to all this private info about the Clintons, but the identity of the person was limited.

The way I see it, social networking sites are destroying anonymity, not privacy. As of a few years ago, if I did something stupid in public, though any number of people may have seen me do it, I could be relatively assured that my identity would not be connected with the act. If I don't wear my name on my shirt, I'm probably not going to be recognized (all the more reason dumb college pranks are done naked - not by me, of course).

But that's blown out of the water now. With ubiquitous imaging and communication technology, the odds of remaining anonymous in an act or utterance is getting vanishingly small. Where before there might be one polaroid of, say, a fraternity pledge class playing football naked at midnight (again, not involving me, of course), now that picture would most assuredly have bee taken digitally. And published. And, where there is a practical limit to the number of times a polaroid can be passed around, thereby limiting the chance for identity recognition, there is NO practical limit to transmission and duplication of digital imagery. SOMEone is going to recognize someone else in a photo. Period.

Anonymity is dead. The days of being able to do and say stupid stuff in public and not be associated with those acts is over. Keep it private, or don't do it at all, or face the consequences of public actions. It may be that the latter isn't the disaster it's being made out to be.

Re:Private Lives Private

[Oldstench]

[..]the general principle (that pretty much what we use it for is to hide stuff we shouldn't be doing) was about right. I completely disagree with this premise. Privacy, personal space, and the non-invasion of unwanted and unknown others into my life are extremely precious to me and extremely difficult to find in today's overcrowded world.

By saying that I only use my privacy to hide illegal or 'immoral' activity is total crap. Is taking a shit while reading a book wrong? No. Do I want people to be able to watch me? Hell no. Same goes for having a private conversation with my girlfriend about her bad day at work, sitting in a comfy chair and disappearing into some great music on my headphones, or even jerking off to porn if it suits my fancy. No one else should be privy to that.

Is a more 'open' society what we really want? I don't believe so. The less I know about the randoms out there the better, as most of them would probably just piss me off or make me sick to my stomach. If some idiot wants to put everything they ever do online and others want to watch their every move, label them as the exhibitionist/voyeurs that they are and be done with it. Don't use it as a rallying cry to try and make society more 'open' as if this would suddenly cause world-peace.

---
When I destroy the Internet, I am going to start with LiveJournal.

Re:Private Lives Private

[ShieldW0lf]

As far as I'm concerned, privacy is for liars and conspirators.
I don't know which is more appropriate:
+5 Batshit Insane
or
+5 Awesome Satire

As far as I'm personally concerned, it has to do with having integrity, and actually wanting to wear that integrity on the outside.

On the larger scale, I resent being obligated to assist those who have demonstrated that they have no integrity with the fruits of my labours because society is engineered to prevent me from judging a person by the quality of their character.

I want to be able to accurately say "No. You might be a good businessman or a smooth talker, but you're a fucking scumbag, and I'm not going to help your enterprise succeed."

But hey, a lot of my friends think I'm batshit insane, so that's probably the right one.

Re:Private Lives Private

[R2.0]

Nope - there is an exception for celebrities and "public figures". Basically, if one has tried to put one's self in the public eye (politician, actor, etc.), then one becomes subject to the news media reporting on that life. Regular folks, who have done nothing to put themselves in the public eye, enjoy greater protection. I'm just not sure how far that protection extends. I know crowd scenes are an exception - if a reporter takes a picture of a protest, and there are hundreds of people in the frame, they don't have to get releases from everybody; it's impractical and the subject of the photo is the crowd, not the individuals in the crowd.

Re:Private Lives Private

[egburr]

Yeah, I only named two. How many would be sufficient for you? Those were examples of types of jobs where it mattered, and both of those examples have a very large number of people employed across the country. As for the size of the city, how large does the city have to be before it becomes a non-issue? I live in a city with a population of 106,000, and my wife often encounters people that she met through her job and who she has to maintain her on-the-job behavior for, sometimes once every week or two, sometimes a few in a day; the point is that you never know when or where that encounter will occur. I grew up in a town of about 30,000, and any time I got out of the house (not counting school) I inevitably encountered at least one person I knew by sight even if not by name. I'm sure that is even more common in smaller towns. The majority of the world (or even the US) does not live in NYC or LA.

I certainly agree that the police profession's example is somewhat sullied, but that doesn't change the fact that they have a very public role and are supposed to set a good example even off duty, and the vast majority of them do. The ones that don't, the ones you hear about, are a tiny minority giving the rest a bad rap.

It's part of the job requirement; if you don't like it, find a different job, because you are obviously not suited for that one. The original post stated that off-the-job behavior was no business of the employer; I was showing some examples of some professions where it is their business. I am not saying it is always the business of every employer.

It can affect job performance, and not in any way that can be measured. If you're slightly drunk at a bar and acting up a bit, someone who sees you there and who you're counseling about alcoholism isn't going to pay much attention to you after that (there you go; another job example). If you're yelling and screaming at someone who scratched your car in the parking lot, instead of talking calmly and getting the police if needed, how do you think your student (who was out shopping with his mom and saw you there) will react in school the next day when you tell him to calm down after he flies into a rage when someone pokes him?

Any profession where you are holding up your own behavior as an example will typically require you to maintain that behavior in public even when off duty. If you don't, you are making your own job that much harder when someone you work with sees you acting contrary to that example.

Re:Private Lives Private

[discord5]

There is the potential that it may be possible to extract a non-trivial amount of information on a person simply from their associations with others.

Isn't that what your parents told you when you were little when they said "He's a bad influence" ? Sorry for butchering your post, but I think that sort of applies. If you asociate with a drugdealer, people are going to assume you're somehow connected to drugs.

Re:Private Lives Private

[KiahZero]

The solution isn't to cower, it's to encourage everyone to live more openly.

Re:Private Lives Private

[Anonymous Coward]

More like she wanted him to go down on her... but the smell drove him off before he made it to the navel...
She wanted him to screw her... but the feeling was so similar to soggy rotten mushrooms that it made him physically ill...

Fat is not for Cheech.

Captcha: Swastika

Re:Private Lives Private

[rucs_hack]

I dunno...the younger age group there, really does not understand or comprehend how their actions being published on the net can have LONG term consequences.

Have you ever considered that they might not care? Seriously, they might not. My son and his friends share things using technology it never would have occurred to me to share. Things I would keep private they share, and these kids will be the ones forming companies and running the technology world in the ot too distant future.

Privacy means different things to kids now. It may well be that all it will mean in the future is access to your money is restricted.

Re:Private Lives Private

[Digital Vomit]

Wouldn't a simpler solution be to stop socializing?

This is Slashdot, after all...

Re:Private Lives Private

[Ibag]

The thing is, before social networking, showing pictures to their friends wouldn't have been a huge violation of your privacy. However, due to the way that people now use social networking sites, the preferred method of sharing photos with friends is a violation. Sure, you can request that they not post the pictures, and more than likely they will just laugh it off and ask what the big deal is. You can ask that they not tag you in the pictures, but that doesn't mean that a third party won't end up doing the job. If you are a member of the site, you can restrict access to pictures which you are tagged in (maybe), but that does nothing if you aren't a member. Your only real options are to look like a nutjob to your friends or to put up with the privacy violation.

You're right that it isn't the facebook's fault that your friends are violating your privacy in exactly the same way it isn't thepiratebay's fault that people are downloading movies. Just because taking severe action against them isn't the proper course of action doesn't mean that they aren't contributing greatly to your violated privacy and profiting off of it. Nor does it mean that they should not at all be held accountable or take steps to fix the problem.

So yes, by all means, speak to your friends. But don't pretend that it will be enough to stem the problem for you or for the countless masses who don't even realize yet what a problem it is for them.

Re:Private Lives Private

[Joe Tie.]

Exactly, a lot of people just don't get that this is just a more elaborate version of the same generation gap that's already occurred with the boomers. When a factor shared by a huge mass of a generation is causing them to be excluded from business, someone is going to take advantage of it. Could be the youth themselves, could be businesses which realized that it doesn't make sense to depend on social outcasts to market to the larger majority of the 18-35 demographic. Any company is free to exclude them, but they're shooting themselves in the foot by limiting themselves to spineless twits who get home, close the curtains, and pray that the boss doesn't drive by to see his wife bought a couch which doesn't match the company colors.

In large part I think this is just a case of generation X getting a bit up there in age, but refusing to admit that they're getting out of touch. Every generation eventually becomes the old men whose ideas of culture become laughably conservative to the one after it. Again, it's just proving more difficult this time around because it happens to be a generation whose defining point in many ways was rebellion against society.

Re:Private Lives Private

[Petey_Alchemist]

There is a great book about this called "The Unwanted Gaze" by Harvard Professor Jeffrey Rosen. He gives many examples about how incomplete context can negatively shape otherwise innocuous information.

The easy, kneejerk answer is DON'T POST IT ON THE INTERNET IF YOU DON'T WANT IT TO BE SEEN! But that is too simplistic an answer to a complex social problem.

American privacy law revolves around the idea, proposed by Brandeis and articulated by the Court in Katz, that it is the "expectation of privacy" that users have that determines how much privacy they are accorded.

When I post to an open thread on Slashdot, I have no expectation of privacy, other than obscurity, and that's not defensible. No one seriously argues that open fora have a high expectation of privacy (although you can make a contextual argument; if I'm "obviously" trolling Slashdot, or making an ironic post, the community may understand my post to mean one thing while an outside observer takes it another way. Look at the 4chan bomb scare or the GNAA. But that's not about privacy, that's about incomplete information.)

But let's say I have a Facebook with my privacy settings turned all the way up. Colleague A is my Facebook friend because they know me well and I decide to give them access to my information. Now, if I have all these privacy settings turned on, and I trust Colleague A, don't I have some expectation of privacy on my "public" Facebook?

I'd say yes. But what happens when Boss B threatens Colleague A to let him read my Facebook? I didn't extend access rights to him. In fact, I took affirmative steps to deny such access. Doesn't that go against my expectation of privacy?

It's an extreme example, but the kneejerkers who just say LOL YOU POSTED ON THE INTERNET IDIOT are ignoring the larger social and legal framework that these networks operate under.

Re:Private Lives Private

[magisterx]

Keeping a limited degree of visibility on something is nearly impossible. If someone tells an extremely small number of people with a reason to know (such as medical information to medical professionals, legal information to lawyers, personal secrets to one or two close confidants who know you want it kept in confidence) then they (normally) have a right and reasonable expectation of privacy. If they post it to a large circle of friends, it is no longer private in any real sense. Those friends may tell others who may tell others, and they are generally not under any obligation not to.

To take a benign example, someone may send pictures of their kids to their immediate family. Your parents may well hang it up on the wall and then all of their guests see it. Putting it on a public website is like shouting it from the mountain, you can expect anyone who wants to know will find out, along with a lot of people who didn't want to know. Putting it on a semiprivate website is like, well, telling all of your friends. You can assume they will tell others and generally have no reason to expect them not to do that. Something that is meant to be truly private should be told only to those that have a reason to know and an obligation not to tell others.

Re:Private Lives Private

[davidsyes]

Think of it this way: We are on a long 10,000-year long march toward frabrical integration and denunciation of the corporeal human bean. The body is irrelevant and impermanent. The mined is relevant and permanent.

Think of the iridescent, scentillating, effusive, existential, cosmic, all places, all at once orgasms the collective can have. Why, we might even upset the time-space continuum just having the butterflies. Imagine can happen in marathon CEOs (Cosmic Existential Orgasms).

Re:Private Lives Private

[ShieldW0lf]

Two independent people on the net won't hurt each other, but if one of them represents an organization - this very well could happen.

Gee. Shadowy organizations going out hurting innocent people, that's a great argument for preserving peoples obscurity. Of course, the shadowy organization couldn't operate without obscurity, but lets be reasonable. My moms retirement money is in that shadowy organization, we can't interfere with that...

Re:Private Lives Private

[epee1221]

the general principle (that pretty much what we use it for is to hide stuff we shouldn't be doing) was about right.

Or perhaps stuff that other people tell us we shouldn't be doing.

Re:Private Lives Private

[sootman]

Then you need to speak with the people you associate with about your expectations of privacy.

Another solution is to wear glasses like this.

Re:Private Lives Private

[xant]

But

a) His friends aren't violating his privacy. I don't have to get the permission of my friends to talk about them; neither do I need their permission to post pictures of them.
b) His friends may not be the person with the camera anyway. It could be a complete stranger. You don't need someone's permission to take a picture of them, nor to publish one.

I hate to break it to all you folks, but the privacy battle is over, and privacy is on its way out, no matter what we do. The Internet did, in fact, change everything.

But it's not necessarily a bad thing. The more powerful you are, the more your public mistakes mean. Us rank and filers might occasionally lose a job, but ultimately the loss of privacy will mean that the President of the US can finally be held accountable for his actions, along with every other elected official, corporate officer, police officer, military officer, and so on. Loss of privacy means a gain in accountability. It means people have to start acting responsibly, finally.

Re:Private Lives Private

[Anonymous Coward]

On the larger scale, I resent being obligated to assist those who have demonstrated that they have no integrity with the fruits of my labours because society is engineered to prevent me from judging a person by the quality of their character.

Or put more bluntly: you're a social retard, and think that the rest of society should change to fit your idiot views.

Or even simpler: wah!

Re:Private Lives Private

[thegrassyknowl]

Then you need to speak with the people you associate with about your expectations of privacy. It's not facebook's fault your friends are violating your privacy.

This is true, but Facebook, Myspace and others provide a really simple means for people to upload photos and associate them with email addresses or real names. They are a data harvester's dream.

Trying to tell some of the (I'll hesitate to use the word I want) lesser savvy users why I don't want them putting my real name, anything about me or photos of me into the Intarwebs is like trying to talk to a brick wall. They just don't get why it's a problem. One idiot went ahead and actually put my phone number on her myspace page (after my little chat about why not to) with a helpful hint of "he's got a new number now, if he hasn't told you yet here it is". Not like I didn't change my number so that some of those people didn't have it in the first place!!!

I also had a myspace account that had no identifying marks in it. I used an alias and a dodgy email that I hardly use for anything (except dodgy, incapable of using BCC: to 100 people friends) to sign up to see what it was all about. One of my friends decided to try and add me using that email address and put my real name in one of the fields. Until I deleted it, if you searched for my real name on Myspace you could find that profile even though I'd never entered my true name into it.

You could probably s/myspace/facebook/g in this post and still be mostly accurate too.

Re:Private Lives Private

[Wes Janson]

Oh, right, because it's perfectly reasonable that gp must go to every single person who knows his/her name, and politely ask them never to post pictures of them on Facebook/Myspace/etc, or to ever mention their names on the internet. Most normal people would not respond well to requests like that, and most people aren't going to make such requests, even if they value privacy, specifically because of the social repercussions of acting paranoid. There is a distinct trade-off for most people between sacrificing privacy and maintaining normal social ties.

Re:Private Lives Private

[greenbird]

As far as I'm concerned, privacy is for liars and conspirators. I don't want anyone to have it

This from someone posting under the pseudonym of "ShieldW0lf" and won't even show an email address on their profile. Hmmm... Maybe a wee bit hypocritical?

Re:Private Lives Private

[rucs_hack]

Well thankyou for agreeing with me. I was thinking I'd be moderated troll for stating my opinion. It's based on observation though, which is the best I can do.

Re:Private Lives Private

[internewt]

As far as I'm concerned, privacy is for liars and conspirators. Do you have curtains in your house?

Do you wear clothes in public?

If someone confides their emotions with you, do you keep it quiet if they want you to?

You're a troll, aren't you? Or are you really that short-sighted?

Re:Private Lives Private

[Petey_Alchemist]

...and one more thing:

If you actually watched the video, Shirky--who is a great guy, by the way--talks about how malls are public places too. But if you went around a mall with a boom microphone, recording the conversations of people near you, people would think you were NUTS, and might even sue you for invading their privacy. Why? Not because they're not in public, but because we have a social understanding that when you're in a crowd, people might hear what you have to say but they don't record it and they don't use it out of the context of the immediacy of conversation.

Now that's not a perfect analogy for the Internet, because by default everything on the Internet is recorded automagically. But the context part is still true. Even if a comment (like this one) on Slashdot is publicly accessible, if it appeared on CNN tomorrow I'd be just as shocked/uncomfortable/feel like something was slightly wrong as I would be if Anderson Cooper had hidden in a bush and used a directional microphone to catch my idle gossip in the food court.

As the kneejerkers show, we've begun to develop a social consensus that anything you put on the Internet is public and therefore you should expect that it be read by anyone anywhere anytime. That's the technological reality, and it might be the safest way to look at things.

But given our social hangups about eavesdropping--that is, observing conversations not meant for your ears and taken out of the context of the community in which they were made--in TRUE public settings, why is this the case?

Re:Private Lives Private

[Frozen Void]

Join Snubster,The anti-social network.
http://www.snubster.com/

Re:Private Lives Private

[Anonymous Coward]

By saying that I only use my privacy to hide illegal or 'immoral' activity is total crap. Is taking a shit while reading a book wrong? No. Do I want people to be able to watch me? Hell no. Same goes for having a private conversation with my girlfriend about her bad day at work, sitting in a comfy chair and disappearing into some great music on my headphones, or even jerking off to porn if it suits my fancy. No one else should be privy to that.


I might be totally off base, but the impression that I have on people who are very concerned about their privacy is that they somehow suppose other people will be interested in what they are doing. Hell if you posted a video of you taking a crap, jacking off to porn, or whatever, I wouldn't care about it.

Re:Private Lives Private

[drsmithy]

I dunno...the younger age group there, really does not understand or comprehend how their actions being published on the net can have LONG term consequences. It wasn't that long ago I was in that mode of mind, and when you are in the bulletproof years, you needn't worry about anything.

It's bigger than that. Thanks to helicopter parents and widespread litigation, the cottonwool generation are damn near incapable of risk assessment or taking responsibility for their own actions. After all, what do they have to worry about when their parents will bail them out of any trouble and anything that goes wrong is always someone else's fault ?

Re:Private Lives Private

[mwvdlee]

Considering that I have neither a Myspace nor Facebook (nor equivalent) profile, I fail to see how such sites will profoundly change my ability to keep my private live private.

Re:Private Lives Private

[koning_robot]

The more powerful you are, the more your public mistakes mean. Us rank and filers might occasionally lose a job, but ultimately the loss of privacy will mean that the President of the US can finally be held accountable for his actions, along with every other elected official, corporate officer, police officer, military officer, and so on.

Those are state secrets, comrade!

Re:Private Lives Private

[xant]

Yeah, I know. And the state is going to fight it. It's going to fight us tooth and nail, for decades, and it's going to seem hopeless for most of that time, that we are not going to have privacy and our rulers will continue to operate the way they do now.

In the end, though, the story will read the same as the story of the losing battles of the RIAA against everyone in the world. Copying information is free, and everyone wants to do it, so they do.

Collecting information is nearly free, and getting freer. Video cameras will become ubiquitous; personal recording devices will be the norm, and all of those personal data feeds will be fed to the internet, whether intentionally or not, and stay there, in the permanent and public brain, for all time, so if nobody notices that meeting of Joe Politician with Jane Hooker on hookercams.com today, they'll notice it in a month, or a year.

And one day, they'll stop fighting. And then we'll have a completely open society... not because we wanted it, but because information fucking wants to be free, and it's more powerful than we are.

Many eyes make corruption shallow.

Re:Private Lives Private

[spiralx]

David Brin has written a lot about the "transparent society" on his website as well.

Re:Private Lives Private

[Escogido]

I think in the next 10 years when we really start seeing the results of this type of thing, we will see a lot of lives that can reach less that what they potentially could have, or more acceptance of a person's past behavior that was a bit childish. If you think the latter, then ask yourself by today's politicians aren't more frank and public about their past 'drug' indescresions...since we are now starting to get well into the age ranks of people where very few are out there that never even tried any before ever. Nope...still taboo if you want to be in public office. I am actually 'sure' of the latter. Your analogy with the drugs experience for public office candidates/holders is good, however I believe it is just 'still too early' to expect changes. I give it about 20 years for the (civilized) world to universally accept the fact that people do stupid things when they are young. Hopefully. :)

Re:Private Lives Private

[ScorpFromHell]

Do you mean the encryption part of PGP/GPG to help in keeping private messages private?

That works for one-to-one communication. Great.

But ... how do I make a message readable only for my immediate circle of friends & not the circle out friend of friend using PGP/GPG? It would have to be signed with the public key of each individual in my circle of friend, isn't it? More usage of CPU? Performance issues? Escalated costs?

I bet the sites are not buying the idea unless the added costs are either minimal or the public uproar is more than the cost of implementing the privacy s/w.

Re:Private Lives Private

[Anonymous Coward]

Rather, they're changing our ability to make our public lives more public. This is an important distinction, since these social sites make it quite clear by design that you are sharing your information with your friends and acquaintances.

You beat me to making this point, and I encourage you to continue to make it as you get the opportunity. This "social networking sites will destroy privacy" meme is spreading, which reflects a fundamental failure to distinguish between the voluntary and the unchosen. I find this disturbing due to what it implies in the political context.

Re:Private Lives Private

[Anonymous Coward]

Only because it hasn't bit them in the ass yet. Once they start to leave school they'll figure it out.

Re:Private Lives Private

[d'baba]

"I dunno...the younger age group there, really does not understand or comprehend how their actions being published on the net can have LONG term consequences. It wasn't that long ago I was in that mode of mind, and when you are in the bulletproof years, you needn't worry about anything."

Don't you know it's going on your Permanent Record!

Idiots, not Facebook, spell the end of privacy.

[xC0000005]

If you stand on the corner and scream out your inner most thoughts, don't be suprised if anyone within a few blocks knows (and crosses to the other side of the street when they see you coming). Don't want something known widely? Don't post it on a public web site.

Re:Idiots, not Facebook, spell the end of privacy.

[garcia]

Don't want something known widely? Don't post it on a public web site.

Not only that but I'm not sure why they are surprised that employees can view the surfing habits of individuals users on the site that they host. I guess it goes back to the whole story yesterday about US Consumers being clueless about online tracking. Honestly, I continuously monitor the viewing habits of users on my website (the vast majority are anonymous however) so that I can improve content posted, how content is laid out, etc.

This is such a non-story that it isn't even funny.

Re:Idiots, not Facebook, spell the end of privacy.

[compro01]

Don't post it on a public web site.

and make sure no one else posts it either. every 3rd* person has a cell phone capable of recording video or at the very least taking pictures.

Re:Idiots, not Facebook, spell the end of privacy.

[chord.wav]

I agree. Now, a big part of the problem isn't you screaming what you consider private. Is that you can't control a crowd of known idiots shouting in public every little detail they know about you. Specially when such sites as Facebook don't require your authorization when other people post about you. Regardless of your authorization, if they post it, "they" know.
On the other hand, if you don't appear at all in any social site, that would sure make you a prime suspect to any NSA agent who would and should order further research on your social habits, probably digging more deep than you would ever wanted to.

Re:Idiots, not Facebook, spell the end of privacy.

[Billosaur]

Well, it's not a news flash here in the tech community, but to the outside world it is. However, you don't see MSNBC, 20/20, or any of the other news shows spending a lot of time on this kind of subject. The Internet is still the 21st Century's version of the Wild West. When you think about it, it's a pretty lawless place, given that it crosses international boundaries, is subject to blocking/re-routing at the whim of some governments, and that no one group really controls it, despite the fact that everyone wants to put their stamp on it. The general populace still views the Internet as magic and has no regard for just how it all works. Like their cars, they don't notice anything is wrong until it breaks down for them.

Re:Idiots, not Facebook, spell the end of privacy.

[garcia]

Like their cars, they don't notice anything is wrong until it breaks down for them.

Another bad analogy I guess because this really doesn't apply here at all. Facebook is doing something that they should be doing. Monitoring usage of their site. Nothing is broken and there don't need to be any laws governing this.

A website operator and its staff should have the ability to see and do whatever they need to make certain the site continues to operate well as it grows and the userbase evolves. If those working behind the scenes at Facebook were only permitted, by law, to run the site and offer some sort of internal privacy guarantee that no one would look at what content was out there, the site would fall apart to legal pressure from the outside for other violations.

Re:Idiots, not Facebook, spell the end of privacy.

[vertinox]

Don't want something known widely? Don't post it on a public web site.

And for gods sake... If someone else posts it, don't send them a DMCA takedown notice or it will be the top downloaded torrent in 1 hour.

But seriously, I don't have a face book account but I think there are pictures of me out there (I got mistaken for an anime character at con once I think). I suppose I could threaten those accounts for having a pic of me standing in a crowd, but that isnt' really worth it the effort.

Still... I suppose an employer with facial recognition technology would one day find me on someones face book attending a convention.

Re:Idiots, not Facebook, spell the end of privacy.

[Mad Dog Manley]

Don't want something known widely? Don't post it on a public web site.

There are a lot of comments similar to this, and also ones such as "I don't join Facebook because I don't want to be involved".

However, if you have friends who are on Facebook, then welcome to the party, you are now involved. I have signed onto Facebook in order to keep an eye on what other people are posting about me. Your friends could have dozens of compromising pictures of you from your last drunken rampage, embarassing moment, or something more innocuous like vacations etc (oh, so you've been to Morocco, Egypt and Iran in the last year.. interesting), or just general reporting of your whereabouts and activities.

Just because you're not on Facebook, doesn't mean your face isn't plastered all over it. You had best get online and see what is actually there, if you want to pressure your friends to remove content that you do not deem acceptable.

Re:Idiots, not Facebook, spell the end of privacy.

[Dragonslicer]

Not only that but I'm not sure why they are surprised that employees can view the surfing habits of individuals users on the site that they host. I would be surprised if more than a handful of senior employees and/or IT staff have the server access required to directly view information about individual users. Well, maybe not too surprised. More like dismayed, I guess.

Re:Idiots, not Facebook, spell the end of privacy.

[Anonymous Coward]

Other than a few huge organizations subject to the Sarbanes-Oxley rules, I would be surprised if anyone goes to the trouble to prevent software developers from accessing the production databases. Every startup I've been at put the password in plain text in the source control system, and why not? Sooner or later every team member is going to get it, because they can't join in a debugging marathon without it.

Solution: don't join facebook?

[VorpalEdge]

It's not like anyone is forcing you to join it or other social networking sites. If you must join it, just have a cursory account and don't update it, ever. Just use it to read your friend's news or whatnot.

You can only lose privacy in this sort of thing if you give the info out to begin with. If you don't do that, you're pretty safe.

Re:Solution: don't join facebook?

[seededfury]

I once had thirteen accounts on myspace to create my own social network within the site. It is a lot of fun sharing secrets with myself

Re:Solution: don't join facebook?

[Rik Sweeney]

The only problem is that someone can just post a picture of you having a pee in the middle of the street on a Saturday night and then next thing you know, it's in a national newspaper.

Rather like this

Re:Solution: don't join facebook?

[Billosaur]

Go it one better... make stuff up! Do you honestly think that the vast majority of Facebook users are reporting completely factual information in their profiles?

This is nothing new -- people say it about online searches, eBay auctions, Amazon.com profiles. Nobody is making anybody put their information on the Web. The only reason you would want it out there is to get noticed for something. If you're willing to accept that exposing your life details is going to expose you to all sorts of other unsavory things, then be happy. If not, lower you Web footprint and stay in the background.

Re:Solution: don't join facebook?

[Anonymous Coward]

> I once had thirteen accounts on myspace to create my own social network within the site. It is a lot of fun sharing secrets with myself

You, sir, are a dork.

You may also qualify as a "social masturbator".

Re:Solution: don't join facebook?

[Anonymous Coward]

That's enough for most intents and purposes - of the data miners. Knowing the relationship web tells them who you are by association. Looking at whose news you read and who sends you mail gives them that information. It is true. The existence and widespread use of social networking sites does limit your individual freedom to keep your life private by increasing the cost: You can abstain only at the cost of being excluded from social events and news which are communicated through these sites.

Re:Solution: don't join facebook?

[Tony Hoyle]

The only problem is that someone can just post a picture of you having a pee in the middle of the street on a Saturday night and then next thing you know, it's in a national newspaper.

It's only news to the chattering classes. Anyone who's actually been *outside* on a saturday night has seen worse than that every single week.

And I agree with the comments on that page. WTF is it with the focusing on women? Like last month they were all nuns or something?

Re:Solution: don't join facebook?

[Anonymous Coward]

Of course you are not forced to join any social network or buy online, but if people accept and tolerate the traking of any personal information more and more companies are going to make track it. So it will get harder to even avoid broadcasting personal information.
If one day everyone uses basecamp (37signals) and you are forced by your client to use it, what are you going to do? The next day 37signals decides to sell your personal Information...

Re:Solution: don't join facebook?

[Anonymous Coward]

But even you post nothing, the Facebook people are watching you look at other people's pages!

Re:Solution: don't join facebook?

[Anonymous Coward]

Duh. They could have done it without facebook anyway.
That's what reporters (or Paparazzi) were for.

It all depends on how well the papers sell.

Re:Solution: don't join facebook?

[Hitto]

If you get THIS shitfaced, I say it's your own goddamn fault. Who pees in the middle of the street, apart from dogs?
CONSEQUENCES, PEOPLE!

I'd comment on this...

[Anonymous Coward]

But I have a feeling someone is watching!

*gasp*

Re:I'd comment on this...

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah.. about that. Could you *please* wear pants when surfing the internet. It would do all of us here at HQ a big favor. I'd simply put in a request to brainwash you into putting on pants, but the paper work for that is like ten pages, and it takes a couple months to go through the red tape and what not. If you don't comply, we'll simply just have to come to your house and beat the everliving daylight out of you. Less paperwork for that.

Egregious nonsense

[Angst Badger]

Eventually, Shirky theorizes, society will have to create a space that's implicitly private even though it's technically public, not unlike a personal conversation held on a public street. Otherwise, our ability to keep our lives private will be forever destroyed. ...Or you could just refrain from posting the details of your private life to the Internet.

Re:Egregious nonsense

[physicsboy500]

But you forget the compulsive typists like myself that can't help but divulge things like their cheating wife and erectile dysfunction on the internet in public forums... wait...

*submit*

"DAMNIT!"

Re:Egregious nonsense

[TheViewFromTheGround]

Saying that you can simply refrain from posting the details of your private life to the Internet misses part of the point here. To communicate with many of my friends, who insist on using social networking sites as their main avenues for staying in touch with friends, I am forced to use a privately-owned network where many of my rights may be waived. You could say, of course, that I should not stay in contact with those friends, but in real life it is not so easy to make such demands, especially when we are talking about communicating with relatives and dear friends, often in cases where communication is essential, such as family emergencies. Pragmatically, it just isn't always feasible to say "use the public internet and the (broken) standards for email."

The phenomena is similar to the shrinking amount of public space in the United States: A popular tourist destination in the city where I live used to be public property, and anyone could come with a sign and a cause and exercise their right to free speech -- including criticizing the government that maintained the large, open-air space. Within the past decade, the city sold the land and put the space under private management, and now one cannot go and peacefully exercise their right to free speech -- the private owner has far greater effective and legal discretion over what happens on their land. Most of us must move quite a bit through the space around them -- roads, offices, parks, hospitals, stores, and even virtual spaces -- and the ownership (common, corporate, or individual) has an effect on what we do and say, and what others can do and say to us.

Re:Egregious nonsense

[R2.0]

"To communicate with many of my friends, who insist on using social networking sites as their main avenues for staying in touch with friends, I am forced to use a privately-owned network where many of my rights may be waived. You could say, of course, that I should not stay in contact with those friends, but in real life it is not so easy to make such demands, especially when we are talking about communicating with relatives and dear friends, often in cases where communication is essential, such as family emergencies."

You are conflating 2 different issues.
1) People put stupid crap about their personal lives on social networking sites - pictures, poetry (ugh), etc. Solution? Don't do that in your account.

2) People use their social networking page to communicate with others. Again, don't use the site for important/potentially embarrassing communications.

Here's where your example gets confusing. You say "many" of your friends insist on using these sites? How does that affect how you deal with "relatives and dear friends" - one assumes a much smaller number. If you want to communicate with less important friends on these sites, talk about less important stuff - keep it banal and bland. For your more important folks, are they really going to drop you if you reserve more important/embarrassing communications for more secure transport?

And "family emergencies"? Are you kidding? If you are relying on a social networking site to communicate with family members in a crisis, you are an idiot. Ever heard of a telephone? You can still call collect.

The whole situation isn't black and white. No one is "forced to use a privately-owned network where many of my rights may be waived". You choose to do it. And if you choose to use it for communications that would be better on a more secure network, that's your lookout.

Re:Egregious nonsense

[prostoalex]

...I am forced to use a privately-owned network...

A government-owned and mandated social network is something you're totally cool with then?

Re:Egregious nonsense

[retro128]

Saying that you can simply refrain from posting the details of your private life to the Internet misses part of the point here. To communicate with many of my friends, who insist on using social networking sites as their main avenues for staying in touch with friends, I am forced to use a privately-owned network where many of my rights may be waived. If the only way they want to talk to you is through a site full of attention whores, are they REALLY your friends?

Re:Egregious nonsense

[Anonymous Coward]

"To communicate with many of my friends, who insist on using social networking sites as their main avenues for staying in touch with friends, I CHOOSE to use a privately-owned network where many of my rights may be waived."

Pretending you are forced to do it does not, in actuality, mean you are forced to do it.

The victim mentality you have doesn't change that you make a choice, period, end of discussion.

And to all of you repeatedly blathering about "photos" that end up on someone else's page? Guess what? DON'T ACT LIKE A FUCKING IDIOT. Problem solved.

I wish I had the luxury of the childish mentality you do, but I have to act like an adult. Perhaps someday you will too.

Re:Egregious nonsense

[TheViewFromTheGround]

A government-owned and mandated social network is something you're totally cool with then?

There is a such a thing as a commons, and public space. Public space is not exactly government-owned in many traditional theories of property -- it is owned by some definition of the "public" and is regulated on the public's behalf by the government.

Re:Egregious nonsense

[EvilSporkMan]

You must be confusing Facebook with Myspace.

Re:Egregious nonsense

[jdp]

Well said, View from the Ground!

jon, wishing he had mod points.

Re:Egregious nonsense

[Risen888]

I agree with almost everything you said there, but you lost me with "communicating with relatives and dear friends, often in cases where communication is essential, such as family emergencies." Who the fuck uses Myspace to communicate about family emergencies? I get phone calls.

Future Society

[Grandiloquence]

I think they're referring to the Facebook Wars of 2013, after which the nominal Facebook World Government will require all citizens to publish their most intimate details online for public scrutiny.

Re:Future Society

[decipher_saint]

"I think they're referring to the Facebook Wars of 2013, after which the nominal Facebook World Government will require all citizens to publish their most intimate details online for public scrutiny."

The revolution will not be posted to YouTube!

Christ! More fucking Facebook editorial bukkake

[Anonymous Coward]

Dear Journalists: Want to pre-write your next, oh, 50 articles? Dig up all your Friendster posts from the 90's, find-replace, and you're done.

Seriously, watching people OMGZOMGFACEBOOK!!!111one is just as painful as it was back then.

Re:Christ! More fucking Facebook editorial bukkake

[Doug Neal]

"editorial bukkake"

Genius.

Does what happens in the Facebook stay in the Face

[Anonymous Coward]

This seems feasible. A nice way for "The State" to monitor the masses. I still use Facebook as I like it, however, I think before I post information.

This would only hold true...

[TofuMatt]

... if you were forced to get a Facebook account.

Other than what bands I like and what shows I might be going to at local pubs, Facebook knows nothing about me. But the price of putting yourself, and your thoughts, out onto the Internet has always been that anyone can know what you post.

But that's just it, isn't it: what you make public becomes public. That's not shocking news, unless you think that your boss might not notice your "My boss is a dingbat!" Facebook group/blog.

If you're happy (or, in some cases, stupid enough) to be posting (semi-)private details of your life on the web for people to see, especially on sites that you really don't control (like a blog not on your own server or on Facebook/Myspace/etc.), then be prepared to face the consequences; we've already heard lots of stories about students/employees getting in shit for what they write on personal pages. We've been forewarned, and to keep acting shocked, appauled, or violated is absurd.

Your private life is your's, yes, but when you post its details in a public forum... well... shit might happen. Not a new idea.

Re:This would only hold true...

[ObsessiveMathsFreak]

But that's just it, isn't it: what you make public becomes public.

Yes, and what other people post about you also become public. Bear that in mind.

Re:This would only hold true...

[denalione]

To which everyone should remember this adage: If you don't want stuff you would be ashamed of displayed for everyone to know, don't do stuff that you would be ashamed of. At the very least don't do stuff you would be ashamed of with people who have no sense of discretion. This isn't a difficult concept.

Re:This would only hold true...

[epee1221]

... if you were forced to get a Facebook account.

There was a recent homework assignment in one of my classes, "written analysis of the persona you present to the public via your Facebook or MySpace page." Anyone without a Facebook/MySpace was required to create one.

No Privacy Implications Here

[Apple Acolyte]

There are no privacy implications for me regarding Face Book because I choose not to use it. No Face Book, no My Space, nothing. If only security were always that easy.

Re:No Privacy Implications Here

[baomike]

Redundant it may be , but real it is.

Re:No Privacy Implications Here

[Risen888]

Not only redundant, but totally missing the point. One of the bonuses to having a Facebook account (which I do) is that I can vet what other people post about me, be it pictures or the blow-by-blow of last weekend's party or whatever. You cannot do that. You don't even know if there's stuff on Facebook about you. Tell me again how there are "no privacy implications for you."

Or you could just, you know

[Sycraft-fu]

NOT POST YOUR SHIT ON FACEBOOK!

Seriously, I'll never understand these stories that seem to make it as though you have no choice but to divulge all sorts of personal details online. No, actually not the case. If you wish, you can simply not participate. I personally don't. You can search Myspace, Facebook, and so on, you'll never find anything about me. I don't have a page, don't want a page. I just don't participate in that part of the Internet.

However, even if you do, you can simply not be an idiot about it. It is perfectly possible to create a personal site and give away only the kind of details that you are ok with. There's plenty of information on all of us that is public anyhow, maybe you limit it to just that, or a subset of that. You can have a page and not tell everyone everything about your life. The only problem is if you post intimate details, but expect that only the people who you approve of will see it. That is just, well, stupid. Even if the site claims to have privacy features, don't count on it.

The test I say you should apply is a three factor one: Do you want your mom to know this? Do you want your boss (present and future) to know this? Do you want a creepy sex offender to know this? If the answer to any of those is "no" then DON'T POST IT! Why? Because all three of those people can use the Internet, so all three might come across your page. As such filter your information. Don't post anything you wouldn't want your family to find out, and certainly don't post anything you wouldn't want your work to find out about.

If people just apply a little common sense to it, it really works out ok. You don't have to participate, and if you elect to, if you are just smart bout it and don't do shit like post pictures of you and your friends getting high, you'll probably be just fine.

Re:Or you could just, you know

[Anonymous Coward]

What about people who post pictures of you without asking? If I'm not on the site, I'll never know right?

Re:Or you could just, you know

[Anonymous Coward]

Isn't society, and its relaxed thoughts on security of public info, actually a driver for new technology/security? Napster begot the Ipod in many ways. Shouldn't the programmers be thinking about new ways to filter, protect and make available all of the data that's being pored onto the internet?

Re:Or you could just, you know

[blindcoder]

I couldn't agree more.
Anyone posting shit on 'social networking' (aka: emotional/personal strip tease) sites should just stop a second to think about the consequences.

For the rest of us, our chances for a good job go up with every idiot on those sites.

Re:Or you could just, you know

[siride]

What's to stop people from taking pictures of you and posting them on the streetcorner, or giving them to a newspaper, or putting them on a blog or personal website... There's really no way to stop that except for suing for libel, if you actually have a case.

Re:Or you could just, you know

[voltheir]

insightful? this comment has absolutely nothing to do with the real point of the article! how was it modded as such? this site frustrates me more by the day. digg here i come!

Re:Or you could just, you know

[vertinox]

You can search Myspace, Facebook, and so on, you'll never find anything about me. I don't have a page, don't want a page. I just don't participate in that part of the Internet.

Are you so sure? What is stopping friends, relatives, and enemies from posting pictures of you on any of those sites.

Re:Or you could just, you know

[Anonymous Coward]

What does "taking pictures" have to do with "private information"?

Oh right, nothing, it's just the only argument you can think of.

Well, it's pretty fucking stupid, so try again.

Re:Or you could just, you know

[nunyadambinness]

Pictures of me are not "private information". That is an exceedingly weak rebuttal to a very lucid point.

You're reaching, and you're failing.

Re:Or you could just, you know

[vertinox]

Pictures of me are not "private information".

Ok how about a picture and a caption that says "Here is Jeff, my friend from (insert city) getting drunk and shortly before touching the bar maid and then getting thrown out into the street!"

Of course, I don't know if that would fall under your scenario, but what is preventing others from posting such information.

Just because you don't doesn't mean it happens. You could never leave the house, not have any friends, and yell at strangers when they photograph you when you are forced to leave the house but the majority of people out there do things they'd rather not everyone else know about.

Of course I'm not absolving those who take pictures of them doing it and then posted for the world to see, but the real question about a facebook society is when everyone does it and you are participating whether you like it or not unless you don't leave the house and all your communication with the outside world is encrypted.

Re:Or you could just, you know

[Goalie_Ca]

Also.. you need to have an understanding with your friends, friends friends, or random people you met about posting certain images as well. See.. these photos can also be "tagged" with your name and everything.

Re:Or you could just, you know

[Eli Gottlieb]

Or, if you have no Facebook account with pictures of yourself, your enemies can just photograph someone else entirely who really did get drunk and grope the bar maid, then tag the picture with your name.

Re:Or you could just, you know

[Risen888]

Other people might post shit about you on Facebook!

(The lameness filter stopped me, so just imagine that's in caps.)

Re:Or you could just, you know

[nunyadambinness]

Ok how about a picture and a caption that says "Here is Jeff, my friend from (insert city) getting drunk and shortly before touching the bar maid and then getting thrown out into the street!"

Still not private information.

"You could never leave the house, not have any friends, and yell at strangers when they photograph you when you are forced to leave the house but the majority of people out there do things they'd rather not everyone else know about."

Please, you're still using the exact same debunked point. All you did was restate it, add a few veiled derogatory comments, and try it again.

IT'S NOT PRIVATE INFORMATION.

Your point fails immediately.

From the linked blog...

[rickb928]

"Within the company, it's considered a job perk, and employees check this data for fun."

And,

"Well, Facebook's privacy policy doesn't explicitly reserve or waive employees' right to check out your profile for any reason. Of course, the practice still reeks of skunkery --"

The linked article goes on, with some anecdotal incidents that make for fun and disturbing reading.

Just about says it all. Use Facebook, pretty much forfeit any privacy. The Facebook employees seem to not only have the power, but consider it high camp to enjoy your data.

Harrr. My Facebook-lovin friends are gonna pretty much feel violated by this. What was that phrase? Oh yeah...

Revelling in the agony of others.

Re:From the linked blog...

[zegota]

What was that phrase? Oh yeah...

Schadenfreude.

Nice.

[Wellington Grey]

Getting an error on the first page, I clicked through for the full video on the page (http://video.aol.com/video/news-switched-shirky/2011535) and got an error message: "We're sorry, but this video is not available in your area." I didn't realize that AOL had to ship the video to England in order for me to see it. I guess I just don't understand how the internet works.

-Grey

Re:Nice.

[freakmn]

Apparently you aren't as familiar with what AOL stands for, either. America On-Line. That's why there isn't a United Kingdom Version.

Oh crap. I fail it too.

Re:Nice.

[Bill, Shooter of Bul]

yeah send a self addressed package to me and I'll send you a copy of the internet on floppy. Please include $10 for shipping and allow 4-6 weeks for delivery. For an additional $10 and a $5 shipping and handling fee, I'll throw in the internet 2.0 for all of the ajax you can legally freebase.

Where's the NON-STORY tagging?

[Jack9]

taking a look at the slow death of privacy at the hands of social media sites

Social Media sites have no influence over privacy. Marked lame.

Re:Where's the NON-STORY tagging?

[trybywrench]

I don't know why the parent was modded troll. Their statement:

Social Media sites have no influence over privacy

is exactly right. Social Media sites have about as much influence over privacy as a street corner does.

Re:Where's the NON-STORY tagging?

[advs89]

To avoid being modded a "troll" in the future - make sure to back up your assertions with facts. For instance, you might say that "Social Media sites have no influence over privacy _because_ no one in making you post anything you don't want to. If you don't want your employer to know about your binge drinking habits - then don't join the [ficitious] 'i heart drinking' facebook group. Also, only make your profile visible to 'friends', so you can pick and choose exactly who you want to see it"

Re:Where's the NON-STORY tagging?

[Jack9]

The implication that posting unsubstantiated information affects privacy in any way is just as fallacious.

Re:Where's the NON-STORY tagging?

[advs89]

No, see, I didn't say "use bigger words and better sentence structure"... I said provide backup to your assertions. But better, I guess...

Re:Where's the NON-STORY tagging?

[Jack9]

There's no need to back up an assertion that's baseless. RTFA. That short enough?

Re:Where's the NON-STORY tagging?

[Anonymous Coward]

I post to a social networking site that I did X. Anyone that could photograph me doing what I claim would both know and have proof of me having done X. As it stands, nothing happens because there's nothing to indicate it's true or not. In court, it's worth nothing. Privacy is not effected in any way. In other news, shooting yourself in the head makes you dead. Oh wait, you want me to prove that too because I didn't cover all the details of muzzle placement, round, and angle?

this is article is completely stupid

[circletimessquare]

people WANT this information out there. end of fucking story. the rest is predicated on a failed assumption

and EVEN IF there is someone out there who is so stupid as to think posting this information is private: who amongst us ever thought it is our duty in this world to protect morons from themselves?

Re:this is article is completely stupid

[Billosaur]

and EVEN IF there is someone out there who is so stupid as to think posting this information is private: who amongst us ever thought it is our duty in this world to protect morons from themselves?

One word: Congress

Re:this is article is completely stupid

[Risen888]

They can call you a troll if they want, but you're right.

Hmm

[Limburgher]

Eventually, Shirky theorizes, society will have to create a space that's implicitly private even though it's technically public, not unlike a personal conversation held on a public street. Otherwise, our ability to keep our lives private will be forever destroyed. Of course, that might already be the case.'"

You mean like /.?

Repeat after me:

[samael]

Security through obscurity is not obscurity - tell anyone and you've told everyone.
Information wants to be free. Even when said information is a photo of you lying unconscious next to a keg.

Keeping the private private...

[_14k4]

In terms of the internet: Why not just stay offline or off of sites like that? It's quite simple, no? And there still exist letters, email, and other methods of communication with past friends. The way I feel about it, if they are still friends today, they've kept communication lines open past highschool/college/etc.

Re:Keeping the private private...

[Eli Gottlieb]

Facebook isn't meant to replace email, letters, or phone calls. It's meant to replace your address book and provide a centralized way to organize members into ad-hoc groups and events.

It actually does something that older methods of communication couldn't and didn't do because of all the redundancy and inaccuracy involved in everyone keeping separate copies of everyone else's data.

Clay Shirky: Reactionary?

[LionKimbro]

The impression I got from Clay Shirky here was, "OMG! The Internet!"

My personal believe is that every person should work and live as openly as practically possible. This is how Open Source has developed, and if we are to have a free society, this is how we should live. It's when you can't see people as people, that you are okay with treating them as trash.

Re:Clay Shirky: Reactionary?

[ObsessiveMathsFreak]

My personal believe is that every person should work and live as openly as practically possible.

Whatever happened to "Trust No One"? Has the X-Files truly been purged from the post 9-11 mind? Wither Richelieu and his six lines in the hand of an honest man. Is it that people have become so paranoid and neurotic that they feel an overwhelming desire to prove their conformity? Are people just blind, or are they consciously trying to prove they have nothing to hide.

You need to get blackmailed. It'll work wonders for your world view.

Re:Clay Shirky: Reactionary?

[npsimons]

My personal believe is that every person should work and live as openly as practically possible. This is how Open Source has developed, and if we are to have a free society, this is how we should live. It's when you can't see people as people, that you are okay with treating them as trash.

I've often thought this way myself, but I always come back to a root problem: people hate unreasoningly (is that redundant?). Until you can wipe homophobia from the human race, there will be good reasons that some people don't come out of the closet. Same goes for any number of other things that we keep private because to not do so would ruin our lives. I'm not a big fan of Ayn Rand, but here's a cogent quote by her:

Civilization is the progress toward a society of privacy. The savage's
whole existence is public, ruled by the laws of his tribe. Civilization
is the process of setting man free from men.
        -- Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead (1943)

Until you can either mandate tolerance, eliminate intolerance, or somehow guarantee absolute freedom/liberty, privacy will be necessary.

Re:Clay Shirky: Reactionary?

[LionKimbro]

It's hard to blackmail me, since everything's already out in the open.

"Trust No One" is exactly what you tell people that you want to keep imprisoned. It's something that corporations say to employees who are considering what the union organizer is saying. It's what the government says to a population it wants to keep in fear. It's where we tell people, "Get back in the closet-- it's good for you." It's the language of isolation, weakness, and disconnection.

Transparency, forgiveness, mercy, and sharing is the language of strength.

Re:Clay Shirky: Reactionary?

[LionKimbro]

Our evolutionary history leaves us with exactly the unreasoning hate that you describe. The story of civilization is to cut off unreasoned hates, and replace them with reasoned loves. Civilization then is a work in progress, and one that the entire public is invited to contribute to.

Those homosexuals who left the closets, and worked to persuade the public to accept them, at great personal risk -- they did significant good. Without them, I would probably be one of those unreasoned haters today, and I owe a debt of gratitude to them. I am proud to be connected with them; I am proud to be connected with myriad social and technical struggles of the past -- this is "humanity."

Meaning is a signal, a signifier, a switch, within a larger system. We cannot construct meaning out of cloud castles that we keep only in our heads, changing nothing.

And we can't do good, without some personal risk.

As it is, we're just talking about people sharing their day to day lives. The risk is minimal, but collectively, if undertaken, will add up to a tremendous good: a golden age of empathy.

Re:Clay Shirky: Reactionary?

[sydneyfong]

Whatever happened to "Trust No One"? Being open does not imply conformance. Rather the opposite.

Being open means you admit differences between you and the norm.
Being open means you accept differences between others and the norm.

You need to get blackmailed. It'll work wonders for your world view. I'm sorry if you were blackmailed before. But it's not like everybody who publishes his/her address/phone/whatever gets blackmailed as a matter of course.

Baby/bathwater

[kieran]

"Don't post it" is a good default option, but these sites are too useful to just ignore like that. At one very basic level, Facebook is an address book: you put in your address and phone number and email in, restrict that information to friends and add people you are okay having it. The result, potentially, is an address book that updates itself automatically as people change their numbers and email/street addresses.

Imagine that tied in with your phone, and you have something interesting. And FB has many other interesting and potentially interesting uses - the photo tagging is very nifty and the event organising also useful. But you have to be careful about security if you don't want to get bitten on the ass, and being careful with security is not so easy (or perhaps just not so natural) for the non-tech crowd.

Re:Baby/bathwater

[nickyj]

Ringo was great for this. They also sent an email like every 3-6 months asking if everything is still up-to-date. I really wish people would use this more often, but it doesn't happen. I would love one central place to find phone/email/postal address etc. But there are too many sites.

Re:Baby/bathwater

[pla]

but these sites are too useful to just ignore like that.

Wanna bet?

Here's an idea

[ats-tech]

"social networks are profoundly changing our ability to keep our private lives private"

If you want to keep your private lives private, don't post it on the intraweb for all to see.

Novel... I know.

So what?

[TheBrutalTruth]

This argument (public vs. private) is only relevant if one uses these sites (Slashdot included, folks!). As Big Brother becomes more of a reality day by day, people are playing right into "his" hands. I don't get it, myself. While I post on Slashdot, opening up my views for all to see and criticize - I do not, and will not post pics of my ugly ass on FaceSpace or whatever the social site of the day is. I don't need to be that public, but I guess others do. Is it a social trend that everyone wants to be a star? Wow, my plans to rule the world would never come true is everyone knew about them, drawings included.

My tinfoil hat is painted Red, White, and Blue!

Missing a point?

[SFA_AOK]

Are some replies missing the point?

I'm not able to view the interview as I'm currently at work but the summary talks about a semi-public space. I think the implication is that people want the moon on a stick - a place they can easily share details about themselves without fear of comeback at a later date.

Then again, I wonder why selecting the option of only letting friends view your profile isn't sufficient, but perhaps I'm not down with the kids and their nonchalance to keeping some things private (using words like "nonchalance", I suspect I'm not down with the kids full stop).

RTFA

[voltheir]

Most of the whiny trolls on this site are saying the article is stupid; that if you don't want your information to be public, don't post it. However, many of you either failed to comprehend or failed to read the article. Every click on the site is mined in the database, regardless of your "Privacy Settings". This data is accessible to Facebook employees (and most likely advertising firms and government agencies that pay for/demand it...). That is what the article is pointing out. Even still that should really come as no surprise.

Re:RTFA

[betterunixthanunix]

Hmm...I can do the same with my webserver:

grep your_ip_address /var/log/httpd/access_log

It is unfortunate, but nobody in America respects privacy anymore. Crawling through access logs shouldn't be happening, but we just don't seem to have enough respect for each other for that.

Implications

[Organic Brain Damage]

The original article implies that we MUST all use Facebook if we're going to participate in the world around us today. Me, I'm not going to do it. Screw Facebook and Flickr and the rest of it. Peoples' home movies and slide shows of their vacations were boring in 1970 when they were projected on the wall and they're still boring when they're on Facebook and Flickr.

I guess I'm a luddite, but I prefer to socialize face-to-face with no recording devices. Not cameras, not audio recorders. Some things are best forgotten.

Employers Should Tread Cautiously

[roguetrick]

Opening themselves the information on Facebook and such opens them up to screwing up Equal Opportunity Employer status. Knowing folks religion and sexual orientation is something employers should avoid.

Stupid.

[igotmybfg]

Several things - first, what the hell is a "social media expert"? Reminds me of the absurdly specific correspondent titles on the Daily Show.

Second, social networks are populated by voluntary disclosure, and participants have no expectation of privacy. You never know who might be reading it, so I don't put anything on there that I wouldn't feel comfortable putting on a postcard. This is basically implicit inasmuch as you are joining a social network, where the whole idea is to share information about yourself.

Third, I've found that the best way to defend myself against identity theft is to just be myself, which is to say, boring. Who would want to be me, when even I don't want to be me? Plus, the more time I spend on Facebook, the more I notice that people everywhere are adopting my strategy.

Fourth, at the end of the day, social networks are just another way to waste time on the internet. There's more to life than sitting in front of a computer. I promise!

Get over it

[kscguru]

Or, as Scott McNealy said, "You have no privacy. Get over it." Funny how nobody liked the comment when he made it, yet he was completely right.

Yes, somebody out there is going to store every bit of data they can because it just MIGHT be useful. Data storage is extremely cheap: if a marketer can get one lead from 1GB of web server access logs, he's making a profit. The feds want to cross-index databases because some analyst thinks terrorists would obscure online activities by using one account to communicate with like-minded people and another account to do research for some attack - and if 500TB of data stops an attack, it's cheap. (The idiot analyst is grossly underestimating the difficulty of cross-indexing databases - hint, names are NOT good primary keys - and it's his manager's fault for approving the idea, but you can't stop idiots with poor management from doing stupid things.)

Worse, no amount of government laws will protect your "public" data. Oh, laws can keep the government from using it ... somewhat. (In the US, warrentless searches are inadmissible in court - but they aren't illegal, the police can use such evidence to decide to watch you more closely in hopes of getting real, admissible evidence). But laws are not going to keep private companies from using your data. Privacy policies are great, but (IANAL) probably flimsier than EULAs that everybody here on Slashdot derides. And there is always an immoral company willing to violate its own privacy policy for a business advantage. Example ineffective law: in the US, you aren't supposed to use SSNs for personal identification (except for the IRS). So everyone just starts using the last four digits of the SSN, which technically complies but, when combined with just a little more data, is just as invasive. (Hint: there are 300 million people in the US. 30,000 have the same four-digits as you, 600 are in the same state (in California), 5 are in the same city, and none use the same set of banks you do). The law will not protect your privacy. Sorry.

But what are the effects of this invasion of privacy? A private company could refuse service to you - most companies can already do that for any number of reasons, maybe they don't like your credit history or your choice in web browsers. The government could arrest you - they can already do that for any reason, it's the court that will order your release, and the court is unbiased enough to not care about anything except the charge. Maybe you'll find out your neighbor has a thing for horse porn and think less of him. Well, it's your own fault, if you don't want to know about horse porn fetishes, then don't go looking for them.

What's Off Limits? My Nipples.

[FloatsomNJetsom]

For all of you who are yelling that social network sites unnecessarily require a choice to make things public, check out the Mo Rocca interview video linked to from the main article page. Insightful, to say the least. Hilarious, to say the not least.

Or as some old blues guy said:

[gelfling]

Ya pays ya money ya makes ya choice. I have yet to hear a cogent argument for WHY divulging your life on Facebook is a necessity. You do seem to have a lot of power over what you do and do not divulge. Now in terms of tracking your movements elsewhere - yeah that's a given but the FB generation didn't discover that. I mean you could Google underage porn too - if you think no one is flagging that you are dull.

No issue for me

[ewhenn]

The site Switched.com is taking a look at the slow death of privacy at the hands of social media sites such as Facebook and MySpace ...... Otherwise, our ability to keep our lives private will be forever destroyed. Of course, that might already be the case.'

Or you can not use "social networking" sites, just like myself. Electronic and fast isn't alwaysa good. I'll keep my "social networking" face to face and personal, TYVM.

privacy

[uigrad_2000]

To be completely sure that your private messages remain private, you must:

1. Hand deliver cryptography keys to other party
2. Encrypt all sensitive messages prior to delivery
3. Trust other party to never share the encryption method

Today, with public keys, we can generally skip step 1. The other party can send you their public keys through unencrypted email, or on a public bulletin board, and using them will be fine, as long the mailservices between you didn't tamper with those public keys during transmission.

Everyone (even your mom) knows that steps 2 and 3 are non-negotiable.

So, why would anyone think that sending a private message through facebook would really be private? With encryption as cheap and easy as it today, I think that this is a non-concern. There's no guarantee that facebook won't sell your information to the highest bidder. The same goes if you use gmail or MSN hotmail for email. There is no practical reason that anyone should need to "trust" such companies to keep your information private. That responsibility is yours and yours alone.

Re:privacy

[sydneyfong]

You're proposing a technical solution to a social problem (a common theme here on slashdot).

The problem(s):

- people that don't really understand technology, and have no incentive to
- people who couldn't care less whether their messages are kept private or not
- people value ease of use more than privacy
- people whine and complain loudly as they shockingly discover their ignorance and stupidity

There's no technical substitute for a brain and a clear sense of what you exactly want to do...

filters

[Bota]

It seems to me that the employers who would judge someone on their facebook profile are probably the ones who are doing lines of coke off some 13 year old boy's backside while beating an endangered species to death with a pvc pipe. So what if johnny Q public got drunk and tagged the big girl at the party? So what if he smoked a little grass on his way home from work? The people who put the spin on these things to make them seem evil or bad employee material are simply filtering the things these people are doing in their private life through their own demented view of reality. Yes we should all be a little more private about our private life. but let's face it. the things I do after work are mostly harmless and mostly not worth considering private. If you want to delineate everything you do outside of your workplace as private then you probably don't have a facebook or myspace account. Those that fear being seen for their actions usually are not that into social networking.

Flawed premise

[kennylogins]

nm

And for a Less Paranoid Argument...

[Rachel Lucid]

Let's say you have a fairly mundane existance, except for Creepy Stalker 'X'. Ideally, you would like to be able to prevent Creepy Stalker 'X' from seeing anything, while protecting the rest of your existence.

In the current state of the internet, this can't really be done. On Facebook, it can 'kinda' be done, at least on a user-to-user basis.

Here's a thought

[drix]

Don't use Facebook! If you like privacy, don't put your private life online! I think this is less about the "erosion" of privacy than it is about people simply caring less about sharing things that would have formerly kept to themselves. One of my buddies was telling me about how someone added him to their friend list (or whatever) the other day:

Friend: Remember that girl I hooked up with in New Zealand? She added me to her Facebook the other day.
Me: Hot.
Friend: Yeah I wouldn't have remembered who she was but in her message she wrote "Hey remember me we hooked up in New Zealand!"
Me: And the whole world can see that?
Friend: Sure!
Me: Weird. That's about the whole issue, in a nutshell. You either find things like that completely disturbing... or you're fine with it. Some of us take comfort in anonymity, and apparently many other people like they idea of having this virtual following of people who know (any maybe even care) about where they are, what they're doing, and who they slept with, every second of every day. Call it "indulging your inner rock star," I don't know. I just look at it all and boggle.

public or private

[skt80]

Has anyone considered you don't have to sign up for these sites. You choose to make your life public. You don't need these sites to talk to friends and family. I don't have one, nor will I ever create one. If you sign up and something about you gets put on the web its your fault.

Security through deluge

[Glowing Fish]

I notice that Facebook seems to cause more controversy on Slashdot, probably because unlike Myspace, it is possible to use it without getting a headache.

But the thing with Facebook and privacy is, the information I divulge on there isn't exactly going to compromise me. The fact that my Political Views are "Other", that I am a decent but not good Scrabble player, and that I am in a relationship set me apart (although, as the wags would have it, the last would make me fairly unique on Slashdot). I just don't see what damage this information could do.

In general, there is so much information available on the internet, that putting together the information in a way that could compromise someone is difficult. If someone wanted to spend the time to go through my Livejournal entries, my Slashdot posts, everything on Everything2.com, Facebook, and a few others, they would find out a bit about me, but they would be dragging through so much trivia, that the few "juicy bits" would probably allude them.

Re:Security through deluge

[iluvcapra]

I think the the real information that Facebook vends isn't your interests so much as who you know.

There's this quote from Hannah Arendt that Facebook always makes me think of:

The Okhrana, the Czarist predecessor of the GPU, is reported to have invented a filing system in which every suspect was noted on a large card in the center of which his name was surrounded by a red circle; his political friends were designated by smaller red circles and his nonpolitical acquaintances by green ones; brown circles indicated persons in contact with friends of the suspect but not known to him personally; cross-relationships between the suspect's friends, political and nonpolitical, and the friends of his friends were indicated by lines between the respective circles. [...] this is the utopian goal of the totalitarian secret police: a look at the gigantic map on the office wall should suffice at any given moment to establish, not who is who or who thinks what, but who is related to whom and in what degree or kind of intimacy.

But this is private enterprise, so they may no knock down your door, but what if someone identified as your best friend were to publicly criticize your employer for some policy? They could demand you provide information on them (and in an at-will hire state your job would be on the line), or they could characterize you as a potential risk due to your association and this might cause you to lose a promotion. If someone hasn't already written a facebook API that quantifies an employee's risk to an organization based on his friends, I'm sure it's coming.

Misunderstanding Facebook

[TechnicolourSquirrel]

I think one of the big issues with the development of the social networking sites is that it's not always the person's decision to be featured on facebook - I don't have an account on facebook/myspace/etc, and yet I know there are numerous photos of me, labelled as such, on those sites, because I associate with people who do use them. It's not a big deal at the moment (the photos are only linked in the most tenous of ways, and none of them are particularly dodgy), but there is a potential there - even if someone isn't actually actively participating in such sites, there is likely to be information on them there. You're not on Facebook -- this is why you don't understand how it works, but you have recourse here. You can join Facebook, maintain a very small friends list, and set your profile to be unreadable by anybody else. Then you can change your privacy settings so that photos tagged of you are only visible to those on your friends list. This affects even photos tagged of you taken by other people. That way even if one of your friends decides to make their profile public, any photos they tag of you submit to YOUR privacy settings, not theirs. And since they can always see their own photos, they probably will not even notice that you have restricted their material to YOUR friends list. You don't even have to log in to maintain this privacy barrier -- any future photos that are tagged with your name submit to the same privacy settings. You can even go in and tag the photos with your own name yourself so that they WILL submit to your privacy settings. Facebook is not like Myspace -- it's very much better thought through, and much more private by default. In fact I find them to be completely opposite in their core approaches. People who say Facebook/Myspace in one breath generally don't get it.

Re:Misunderstanding Facebook

[ZombieWomble]

I will confess, I've never used any of the social networking sites (beyond being sat down in front of one by a friend to show off some pictures of various things), so while I was aware Facebook was a bit more secure by default, this picture tagging thing is indeed new to me. Just to clarify this functionality though - can you really tag other people's photos as being "of me" and have them submit to your privacy settings? This seems like it would be a very tricky system to manage effectively.

Re:Misunderstanding Facebook

[TechnicolourSquirrel]

Actually, in response to your question I tested out my theory (I have a dummy account just for such purposes --shhhh) and it turns out that I didn't really understand Facebook, either. It goes pretty far, just not as far as I just claimed. If you mark 'Photos tagged of you' as private, then people looking at *your* profile will not get a link to see photos uploaded and tagged with your name by your friends. And of course -- if your whole profile is friends-only, even when people see your tags in your friends' photos, they will not be able to click your name and see your profile unless they are also on your friends list. You can also remove any tags to yourself on Facebook, and once removed, they cannot be restored, not even by the person who owns the picture. (This happens to my photos all the time -- women especially tend to be very picky about which photos of them get tags and which not.)

But that is all just about links: whoever can actually see your photos themselves is in fact entirely determined by the privacy settings of whoever uploads them, not by who is tagged in them. Basically, there was a rather prominent privacy option that I misinterpreted to restrict the photos themselves when actually it only restricts any linkage between your Facebook profile/identity and those photos. Sorry -- my bad. I'm glad you pressed me on it -- as this is good to know.

Re:Misunderstanding Facebook

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry -- my bad.

Now please say 'sorry -- my mistake' to make up for saying 'my bad' and sounding like a tool.

You'll be glad I pressed you on this!

Two types of Facebook users

[sherriw]

It's my observation that there are two types of users of Facebook. Some of my friends put every tidbit of data about themselves that the site asks for. Their highschool, college, employer, age, religion, sexual preference, relationship, photos, favourite shows, books, who they are related to, etc, etc. It builds a pretty extensive profile of them. These are usually the people who never look at the privacy options to tighten them up and make their profile info available only to their friends. So all their info is basically open to anyone on their network. You could easily find out someone's mother's maiden name, and other 'security' questions used by banks and such. Foolish in my opinion.

Then there's people like me. I have just the absolute basics on there- nothing that isn't already public knowledge. I remove all the 'how do you know so and so' data. I also tighten up all my settings so only my approved friends can view my info. So I have no concern about my potential employers seeing my info... or even the Facebook employees. I also don't approve everyone to view my full profile if I've just me them once. Some people see the number of FB friends you have as some kind of score.

Anyway... it doesn't HAVE to be a privacy nightmare.

Re:Two types of Facebook users

[BlueCodeWarrior]

There's also the people who don't care who sees what info is about them on Facebook.

Re:Two types of Facebook users

[Vegeta99]

Problem is dude, that the privacy options get goddamn bigger all the time. I got the (very fine grained, which is good) privacy controls all set the way I wanted to, and then after they decided high schoolers were ok.... and then everyone was ok.... they decided it was time to add public search, so I had to go in and change MORE privacy settings!

Fuckers.

They could if they want

[Sycraft-fu]

There aren't any pictures of me that I'd mind having public. My friends are the kind of people who don't take photographs of ourselves doing stupid things. Someone could certainly post pictures but they'd be nothing I'd mind, or that you probably couldn't get with a public records search.

Also, friends, real friends, are nice in the fact that usually if you ask them to do something for you, they will. If a friend posted something and I asked them to take it down, I have full faith they would.

Or as the CIA would say

[Sycraft-fu]

"If two people know, it's not a secret." If you tell someone else about something, it is no longer a total secret. So, how restricted that information stays depends on how trustworthy the person you tell is. So you need to limit who you tell things to and do things with. I have some friends that know a whole lot about me, things I wouldn't like made public. However I'm ok with that, because I trust these people to keep that information private, much as they trust me to keep similar things about them private. If I couldn't trust them to keep it private, well then I wouldn't tell them.

Pure Ridiculousness

[x_Curious_x]

Facebook Gen guy here... It's not all bad. Some people actually use these sites for what they're for. Keeping in touch with friends, lost acquaintances, or what have you.

BUT it is really like HS all over again. Gossip, Gossip, omg did you know this happend with this person, because of this news feed. Its really something else. Go out, you here myspace, myspace, or hey I've seen you on Facebook in the background. Amazing. Call me looney but it really seems these sites make people feel relevant or something all over again because they have access to people's business. I for one do not want or ever plan on living in my house with the front door open all the time, so I do make sure to keep my private business off the Internet, and well private..for me. It's all really weird.

I predict...

[DrVomact]

I think in the next 10 years when we really start seeing the results of this type of thing, we will see a lot of lives that can reach less that what they potentially could have, or more acceptance of a person's past behavior that was a bit childish.

As a consequence, there will be a grass-roots surge of enthusiasm for "internet privacy legislation", as all the young dolts who have posted videos of their misdeeds start to seriously worry about getting a job.

just to let u all know

[Anonymous Coward]

FACEBOOK WILL NOT ALLOW YOU TO HAVE A FAKE PROFILE - aka meaning if your name isnt John Doe (or a real type of name) they will delte and ban ur profile till u message them and change it to what it should be - that is the SOLE reason it got to where it is today because people on it have to be REAL people not fictional character(which they have a group for) iv tried the facebook - and i have had profiles ONLY with fake names - each and every single one over time was deleted and banned.

i really hope they discarde this privacy issue and allow fake names to all including people who are on there now

but the will not

because of advertisement

DEATH TO FACEBOOK and ITS INFIDELS !!!

What a great idea!

[coldtone]

Eventually, Shirky theorizes, society will have to create a space that's implicitly private even though it's technically public, not unlike a personal conversation held on a public street

Now registering personal conversationheldonapublicstreetbook.com (starts coding)

Re: Don't write it down

[Anonymous Coward]

My dad told my something very valuable once. He said
"You might think that and you might even say that, but for heaven's sake, don't write it down."

I think about that a lot when I'm blogging, e-mailing, etc. Once something makes it onto the net (racial jokes, nude pictures, political comments) it's never going away and people will have proof that you put it out there.

Great site

[Mantrid]

One always needs to keep in mind that whatever you put on these internet sites could be seen, copied, and used in any way imaginable by virtually anyone. Keeping that in mind, I really like Facebook as it's really allowed me to connect with old college friends etc (from like 15 years ago), as well as other old acquaintances, and current friends. The friend of friends thing is awesome and is probably what makes facebook so addictive and useful. Pretty hard to find the right John Smith, but if that John Smith knows your old friend Joey Joe Joe Junior Shabadoo, then odds are much better it's the right one. It's almost viral, every time I add a new friend within a few days I seem to get more friend invites.

Oddly I also seem to use it as a sort of secondary email system with some of my friends (probably because they are using Facebook so much also).

Try the local library?

[Anonymous Coward]

While you are correct that you cannot force people to learn, you should also recognize that few people have any meaningful *opportunity* to get good security advice. Without studying it in depth, there really isn't much in the way of good advice out there beyond the heavily watered-down newspaper articles that are often ridiculous, outdated or misleading, if not all three.

That said, I had some success in creating a basic computer security class for my local library (that already taught various other simple classes). While I can no longer teach it due to time constraints, they eventually found other instructors who were able to educate the public about basic scams and good computing practices. It's not a lot, but at least it was a start.

What the hell is Facebook?

[Anonymous Coward]

What the hell is Facebook?

"Don't Post" is not enough

[mlush]

Having a social networking account is an inherent risk, you may have a squeeky clean page used to stay in touch with your granny. Then your mate 'Mad Dave' decides to post thoes photos which made you look really pissed (you were yawning at the time), then the interviewer happens by...

Even if you say nothing about your self Facebook reveals your friends, acquaintances and people you happen to be in shot with. Guilt by association could cost a job.

Facebook is the new Blogging

[ThirdPrize]

Fact!

Not a very special episode

[CristalShandaLear]

'Eventually, Shirky theorizes, society will have to create a space that's implicitly private even though it's technically public, not unlike a personal conversation held on a public street. Reminds of a sitcom episode - I think Boy Meets World or Growing Pains. No it was Blossom. Joey, Blossom's goofy brother, gets caught cheating on a test. So he spends all this time trying to find undetectable ways to cheat. He finally decides to hide the answers in the one place only he can look and that the teachers can't see - in his mind. We are perfectly capable of keeping things private if we choose to do so. The problem I have is when other people give up their privacy, or maybe even a piece of their privacy - and that is used as an argument for that person to surrender their remaining privacy or for everyone else to surrender their privacy as well. We all have the right to determine what is private for ourselves.

That's bad thinking.

[Estanislao Mart�nez]

If you don't want stuff you would be ashamed of displayed for everyone to know, don't do stuff that you would be ashamed of.

Privacy isn't just about shame. I have no control over what things would make me look bad in the eyes of other people, and how they might choose to act on this information. In other words, even if I'm not ashamed of some fact about myself, divulging that fact indiscriminately may lead to people who think I should be ashamed of it doing stuff that affects me negatively, both in material and emotional terms. Like denying me employment I'm qualified for, hanging me from a tree, etc.

Go read some Goffman. (Nice quote: "Stigma is a process by which the reaction of others spoils normal identity.")

Re:That's bad thinking.

[sydneyfong]

Then don't do anything that would lead to people thinking of you negatively.
That's what they call keeping a positive "image"/"impression"...

What's so hard about that????

You thought you knew them...

[das_magpie]

But now everyone has turned on you and become on of the.. "Facebook Paparazzi"

Remember how Facebook started

[ppanon]

Originally Facebook started with, and was restricted to, the university/college student population. It was started by people from that environment and initially probably would have hired within those ranks. While there are a lot of serious people in universities, there's also a lot of frat-boy/sorority-girl puerile mentality as well. Is it really surprising that a socially-oriented organization developed in that environment would be at least as likely to inherit from the puerile side as from the serious work ethic prevalent in a post-secondary environment?

There will be no such thing as "stalking"...

[soccer_Dude88888]

because now we are going to use the term "reconnaissance" instead.

Privacy *should not* be required in a sane society

[wikinerd]

The need for privacy is a by-product of human aggressiveness and stupidity.

In a sane and healthy society, people would just let everyone else live as they wanted.

But modern society is not sane and not healthy... Say in your blog that you don't believe in God and you can expect to be attacked by religious fanatics, either online or even offline. Say that you don't like the PATRIOT Act and you will be labelled a 'terrist'.

So, in this crazy and dangerous society where being unpopular is a risk to your life, we have invented privacy to protect us.

But privacy is a sign that a society has a serious problem. Perhaps people should focus on solving the fundamental problems that have led us to feel the need for privacy. The real problem is not the lack of privacy. The real problem is the presence of violent people who are keen to attack other people to force them to live in a certain way.

You're still missing the big problem

[Anonymous Coward]

Having friends who use social networking sites still takes it out of your hands. I'm sure you have no trouble posting inane rants about your escapades from the past weekend. Your friends may still post that information.

And "family emergencies"? Are you kidding? If you are relying on a social networking site to communicate with family members in a crisis, you are an idiot.

I've never seen anyone use them to actually handle things once a crisis arises, but I've seen lots of times when crises were noticed via this sort of communication.

You can still call collect.

Dude... seriously? You actually still can? I gave up on that 7 or 8 years ago.

Public vs. Private.

[bronney]

What I and many people put on facebook are NOT our private life, it's the "no life(TM)" WE decided to disclose. Hence it's not our private lives being exposed and therefore there's nothing to worry about such as and.

We all do have private lives. That's why you don't know my favorite brand of electronic speed controller.

Re: That's unrealistic thinking

[denalione]

You're right. You have no control over what things make you look bad in the eyes of others. I think you should mount a worldwide campaign to raise awareness of this issue in the hopes of changing a core aspect of human nature so that you don't have to be accountable to anyone for any action that you might not be ashamed of but which others think negatively. There is 'should be' and 'is'. Your 'should be' will never be what 'is'.

SIGN HERE. IT'S ALL 'FREE'

[Rockin'Robert]

http://albumoftheday.com/facebook/
Sheer, unbridled, evil - (and YOUR ego).
RR