Slashdot Mirror
Give Up the Fight For Personal Privacy?
KlaymenDK writes "Over the last decade or so, I have strived to maintain my privacy. I have uninstalled Windows, told my friends 'sorry' when they wanted me to join Facebook, had a fight with my brother when he wanted to move the family email hosting to Gmail, and generally held back on my personal information online. But since, amongst all of my friends, I am the only one doing this, it may well be that my battle is lost already. Worse, I'm really putting myself out of the loop, and it is starting to look like self-flagellation. Indeed, it is a common occurrence that my wife or friends will strike up a conversation based on something from their Facebook 'wall' (whatever that is). Becoming ever more unconnected with my friends, live or online, is ultimately harming my social relations. I am seriously considering throwing in the towel and signing up for Gmail, Facebook, the lot. If 'they' have my soul already, I might as well reap the benefits of this newfangled, privacy-less, AJAX-2.0 world. It doesn't really matter if it was me or my friends selling me out. Or does it? I'd love to hear your thoughts on the matter. How many Windows-eschewing users are not also eschewing the social networking services and all the other 2.0 supersites with their dubious end-user license agreements?"
I basically made a facebook account so I could remove tags.
I have no applications installed. Installing ONE removes your opt-out.
Science-fiction author David Brin got quite a bit of attention here on Slashdot when he began talking some years ago about how one cannot preserve privacy in the modern world, and that what we have to do instead is adapt to people knowing so much about us. See his book The Transparent Society .
So despite my efforts to keep my image & life details to myself, this has been undermined many times over by Facebook fanatics who have tagged pictures of me, and have added "helpful" details about how the picture was taken at my wife's cousin's wedding, complete with dates & locations.
I agree, the helpful details etc are annoying as anything. You can, however, UNTAG yourself from photos! If you care about privacy (as you clearly do, and I do as well), I would highly recommend untagging yourself.
You can control tags of you in your Facebook privacy settings.
I'm a lawyer, but not yours. I wouldn't represent someone who thinks taking legal advice from Slashdot is a good idea.
I too have declined to open one, privacy reasons being one of the many reasons, but, I don't find that it has hurt me any.
For one thing...I found that it is not only old people in Korea that use email, I keep in touch with all my friends via email. And not just jokes...we have real conversations,a nd often interesting threads with groups of us on things like political debate. We just don't broadcast it publicly and render it searchable forever.
Also, believe it or not....the phone still is a great way to communicate when you can't be there in person.
I warn people when I can to tell them NOT to put too much out there publicly....some that haven't listened...have already been bitten in the ass by it...and learn their lesson the hard way.
And I gotta say....with the economy getting in bad shape...jobs are gonna get a bit harder to get. And with it already known that many employers NOW search the internet for background on you, putting pics of you out there sucking the skull bong are NOT going to help you any at all.
Bitch about it not being fair to not get a job based on what you do on your own time, or back when you were younger, but, that is how it is today.
On the other hand...maybe I should encourage more people to put stupid shit information like that about themselves on the internet, that will just take them out of competition with me for a good job.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
Facebook implemented without asking anyone anything - until there was a public outcry.
Facebook made it impossible for you to delete your account - until there was a public outcry.
"developers" of "applications" can see a great deal of your private data - this has not been fixed - there has not been a public outcry yet.
If it was private data and how much I choose to let others on the web see then that would be one thing. The issue I see with facebook is that they themselves seem to want to exploit your data at every single stage. Things like the inability to delete your account and "opt-out" services should be the anathema of any business that cares about privacy - instead they nefariously implemented them without consent and defended them until there was outcry. It took a feature piece in the New York Times before they decided to let people delete their accounts. What are they trying to hide?
Exactly. Those that think they MUST have a facebook and myspace are nuts. I keep in contact with my friends by going to be with them. you know leaving you home and interacting outside the home.
My friend in high school that moved to kenya and I havent seen in 12 years? screw him if he cant email me or write me. I will not waste my time to go read his, their ,your facebook wall and shuffle through all the inane nonsense. The ones I know best have a blog that is modern enough to have an RSS feed so I can get updates automagically.
Facebook and myspace and other sites are utter crap as they require you to go and waste hours there digging through the crap. Decent things will allow you to gather and sort automatically so I can get the friends and family overview in 5 minutes every day.
And no, I ignore requests by friend s to subscribe to their twitter. I dont want to know that you just went poop.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.