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

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.