Slashdot Mirror
Facebook Adds Friend Stalker Tool
nk497 writes "Facebook has added a new tool that brings together conversations and photos between friends onto a single page, but — as usual — has crossed the creepy line. Not only does clicking the See Friendship tool let users view photos, comments and events shared between themselves and their friend, it also offers a search tool to do the same between any two mutual friends, making it easy to see everything any two people have ever said to each other Facebook. As usual, the site should have tested the function out on their users first, with one saying: 'I've always wanted this! And yes, I'm a creepy stalker.' Also, as usual for Facebook, all users are automatically opted in, and there's currently no obvious way to turn it off."
Sweet, this will make it much easier to jump to conclusions about which of my friends are secretly bumpin' uglies
If this information was already extant, and this functionality is just an aggregation and compilation of said extant data, then there is no problem. No new information is being provided: public information has simply been correlated, something any person could do on their own at any point prior.
Making already legally accessible data more readable is not in any way wrong. Anyone who fears or is angry about this is in for a shock over the next decade or so as technology reveals all sorts of already public things about them, and younger generations simply won't care.
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Here's a helpful Venn diagram for people who still aren't sure:
http://graphjam.memebase.com/2010/10/25/funny-graphs-never-forget/
"Always forgive your enemies; nothing annoys them so much." - Oscar Wilde
Why the worry about your "friends" doing stalker-ish things to you? Didn't you accept their request (or they yours) based on some level of familiarity and/or trust? It's not strangers watching you. It's people you agreed to let into your little online life.
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No, put this on the growing list of pointless complaints about Facebook. If people didn't post idiocy on the internet, they wouldn't have to be so afraid of people seeing their idiocy.
When you're afraid to download music illegally in your own home, then the terrorists have won!
Personally I think it jumped the shark about two months ago.
I rarely look at it.
I've filtered out about half my "friends" because if I wanted to know what they had on their toast this morning I'd sign up for twitter and follow their stupid tweets.
Delete your Facebook account like I did. Although I'll admit that the first week of not knowing what crops my friends were growing was a little hard on me..
I'm as big of a facebook hater as the next guy, but it seems like Slashdot's favourite pastime is getting on a social network for being, well, social.
If their inference is that facebook should become an antisocial network, I think Slashdot honestly has that market segment covered pretty well already.
And as usual, Facebook is discussed as if it weren't opt-in. There are plenty of other ways of communicating with people.
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ws: Facebook Adds Friend Stalker Tool
Gosh, within one line, asking people to join Facebook and then yet the Xth article about how dangerous facebook is for your privacy.
We know this, but we don't care because we care more about our friend count.
Facebook is a nudist colony. Fine if you want to air your tonker but then don't complain people can see it. You can't share all your personal details withour your personal details ending up shared.
I wonder how people who use Facebook and complain about privacy go through life in general:
Omg! I bought this phone with a subscription, but now I do the math I actually end up paying much more for the phone! How can this be?
Oh no, I bought this gadget with monthy payments and now the payments are more then the original price, why!
I borrowed money for my house, now the bank thinks it owns it. Why didn't anyone tell me!
I streaked naked down the high street, now people are claiming they saw me! I didn't know that what I do in public can be seen by others!
I gave a full confession to a cop and now they using it against me in a court of law! Won't someone safe me!
If you do NOT want everyone on facebook to see what you do, don't use facebook. It ain't hard. It is not an essential product. Billions life happy lives without it. You can too. And the first person to claim that it allows them to keep in touch with friends they never bothered to keep in touch with before I will beat until they learn the difference between a friend, a distant aquintance and a stranger.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
To reference an episode of Seinfeld...
GEORGE: Ah you have no idea of the magnitude of this thing. If she is allowed to infiltrate this world, then George Costanza as you know him, Ceases to Exist! You see, right now, I have Relationship George, but there is also Independent George. That’s the George you know, the George you grew up with — Movie George, Coffee shop George, Liar George, Bawdy George.
JERRY: I, I love that George.
GEORGE: Me Too! And he’s Dying Jerry! If Relationship George walks through this door, he will Kill Independent George! A George, divided against itself, Cannot Stand!
But it's not just me i have to make sure that doesn't post idiocy, but everyone that i do anything socially with. Since facebook has no way for me to remove photos of me posted by other users. The best i can do is remove the tag, but not remove me from the photo or my name from the comments, or have the photo taken down entirely.
All of the above was encrypted with a Quad ROT-13 method. Unauthorized decryption is in violation of the DMCA.
Remember when Facebook used to have a Wall to Wall feature? You know, you'd be able to click on someone's post on your wall, and then you'd see every wall post either of you had ever made to each other. I'm pretty sure you could use it on two friends, but this was a while ago and I can't quite remember. I also believe they removed the feature when they added comments on wall posts. If they didn't they sure hid it from me.
Now we have the See Friendship tool. It does... the same thing, pretty much, perhaps a little more extensively. Essentially you're all complaining about Facebook adding a feature they removed earlier out of redundancy. Do you have a right to complain? Yeah, of course you do. However, if you were fine with that feature before, don't you think it's a little hypocritical to criticize Facebook for putting it back in now, just because it's shiny and "new"?
Hasn't this been around the whole time as "Wall to Wall"? I remember there used to be links where you could see a "Wall to Wall" conversation between yourself and your friends, and you could change the PID in the URL to other mutual friends and see conversations between them. I envisioned making an app to basically do the same with an interface....I thought it would help in searching for conversations. There currently is no good search tool for stuff on facebook as far as I know. For example, I'll remember having someone post a link to me, or mentioning something in a comment but I have no way of finding that. If I could view all of the history between them and myself, I could at least ctrl-f for it.
Good to see Facebook making this easier!
blaming facebook is just shifting responsibility and personal accountability away from you when things go wrong because you weren't discreet
If only the system works like you described. Like someone said earlier, you have more to worry about from OTHER people's posts than you really do your own. Let's say I make a Facebook page - but I don't enter any information but my name and photo. I don't add any of my friends, I basically be a social outcast and hermit on Facebook.
Facebook still allows people to tag "nothings" in photos, so they can tag me in a photo and I won't get ANY notification because the Tag itself won't like to my page - instead it'll just say my name when they hover over it. A potential employer does some research on me - and they find that I have a facebook account but can't see anything but my picture. They then continue their goolge search and see a random picture someone put up of me with my tag on it and know its me because of the photo.
Damn - all I did was enter my name and a good photo of myself - and my reputation got ruined outside of my control.
Oh come on now, Facebook has always been a stalker's paradise. A stalker will meticulously look at someone's profile anyway - how does this help them? They're gonna see everything their "stalkee" posts already.
This only really a helps stalkers stalking multiple people - that way they can see all the juicy details both stalkees are saying to each other
Global warming and other natural disasters are a direct effect of the shrinking number of pirates - Gospel of the FSM
Two things:
1. If you engage in social activity with the kind of people that would post incriminating photos of you, you need to find a different group of friends.
2. If you engage in incriminating activities in a public place where other people can take photos of you, you need to be smarter about where you engage in incriminating activities.
Living With a Nerd
You seem to be confused. Just because you'd like to keep something from general knowledge doesn't mean it's incriminating.
any potential employer or significant other that would judge you so harshly for simply having a life is frankly an employer/ S.O. you don't want to have anything to do with
live your life, and stop worrying so much about micromanaging your public image. us who are well-adjusted simply doesn't care as much as you think we do about pictures of you drunk. its just simple not that big of a deal. the misperception is yours: that anyone cares. we don't care
the internet is what it is: it shows more of our lives, longer, as permanent mementos. adapt to that new reality and accept it, because you can't manage or alter it
anyone who would reject you or fire you based on what the internet contains about you is someone without a level of tolerance you don't want to be involved with in the first place. and if you don't want that behavior of yours made a permanent part of your "internet record", then learn the art of discretion
because this is not about other people, or facebook, or the internet affecting your image in ways you don't want. it's about YOU affecting your image in ways you later regret
you have no one to blame if something is out there you don't want to be out there except yourself. take responsibility for your image. or shift blame onto others, and whine about it, to no effect whatsoever, because you can't do anything about it
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
If you lose your job in a manner that makes you say "well I was better off without those jerks", you're still unemployed. Sour grapes don't pay the bills.
Google is awesome for letting people search the web. Facebook is ultimate evil for letting you search Facebook. If you posted information publically, that all your facebook friends can read...in what way did you have an expectation that your facebook friends wouldn't read it? Were you hoping it would get lost in the flood of bullshit and nobody would read it? Really? You were relying on signal:noise ratio for privacy, rather than actually sending a PM? That's beyond absurd.
ASCII stupid question, get a stupid ANSI
Just because its "on the Internet" doesn't mean its viewable for anybody, my whole mail is "on the internet" after all and that is only viewable by me (and google). The problem with Facebook and social networking in general is that they are all extremely bad at telling the user what information is making it to the public or to the friends, so you end up with a lot of involuntary information leaks.
In most states, employment is "at will".
You can be fired for showing up at work early, because you boss doesn't like the color of your shoes, or just for the heck of it.
This is most certainly not the case in the United Kingdom, and if it's true of the US, it makes me think your legal framework is more than a little backward. Here, there's a short list of fair reasons for dismissal (misconduct, inability to do the job, redundancy etc.) and if the employer can't demonstrate one of those, they can't dismiss you.
OTOH I have seen American colleagues have their employment ended on a whim on several occasions, so nothing surprises me.
Still, the answer is to campaign to firm up your employment law, not spend your life trying to hide stuff from your boss.
You know, once upon a time a person could make a mistake or do something they regretted that would be forgotten and never become an issue. You really want that pic that some 'friend' took at a college party and posted tagged with your name to still pop up on searches when you're 40 something looking for a new job?
Is it no longer OK to make mistakes and have them forgotten?
The number of posts in this thread that are basically saying 'be perfect all the time and you'll have nothing to worry about, or else suck up the consequences' is absolutely shocking.
Sure, if _I_ choose to post something online about myself then I will live with the consequences of doing so. But that is not what this is about. Not even a little bit. (Is it just me or is this thread getting very Orwellian?)
Problem here specifically is that there is this online social community out there that a ton of people use. A lot of people carry out all forms of conversations on it. Sometimes two people will even have a conversation between themselves discussing someone else with the intent that the someone else won't be able to see it, at least that's the way it was the other day when they had the conversation. Now lo and behold, for example, your SO knows all about the exciting trip you have planned as a surprise for the weekend! (See, doesn't have to be about getting fired over some drunken party pic now does it?)
Kids today, so used to their freedoms being given away by the powers that be that they take it for the norm and now are totally willing, or worse, expect that, privacy is to be given away or be non existent as well!
Anyways, for my own self, just another tick on the reasons not to Facebook list.
No Comment.
Yes, in most places in America you don't lose your fundamental freedoms just because you become an employer, though we do keep chipping away at that idea.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Yes, an at-will employee can be fired for “any reason or no reason at all” – but if you were fired for an illegal reason and you can prove this or at least back it up pretty substantially, then you have a pretty good case for a lawsuit.
It works both ways, though... an at-will employee can also leave for pretty much any reason.
Employees who are contracted in for a longer period of time, on the other hand, will also have terms in their contract that ensure their employer can’t dismiss them for no good reason... but in return for that security, they give up their ability to leave that job whenever they want to find work elsewhere.
It’s a give-and-take, and personally I think it’s better this way than having the government dictate to companies whether they can or can’t hire or fire someone.
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
Why would you mind people seeing those?
Because not everyone has the same values as you and your friends. I know that may come as a shocker, but different people have different deeply-held beliefs about what is moral and what is not. You may not even know what your employer (or potantial employer) considers deeply wrong/offensive until it's too late.
I keep my private and professional lives as separate as I an. That includes not having a Facebok account, and never posting anything, really, under my own name on the internet. There's just no need for it.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
As much as I ought to get a new job where the boss isn't an asshole, where the users understand software development, where flextime is acceptable, where I'm paid an extra $20K, in an industry that isn't powered by fear, controlled by foreign influence, fueled by vice, or run on questionable economic principles, where nearby housing is affordable, and the neighbors don't suck, where they run Linux, and code in C, under the GPL, where my skills are honed and expanded, where the commute is painless and cheap, where my future employment is in my hands, in a city my wife can find a job with similar properties, where Sharepoint has been banished from the land, where they pay for overtime but don't ask for it often, where they're loose with vacation and don't mind weeks of unpaid leave, where buzzwords earn you slap across the face, where the mythical man month is understood, where the chairs are comfortable, the carpet is clean, and temperature doesn't have a 20 degree swing.
As much as I ought to go get that job, it turns out that they're not hiring at this moment. I guess we can't all have the perfect life delivered to us on a silver platter. So you can take your apathy, add it as a bullet point on your resume, and shove it up your ass.