Facebook’s Gone Rogue; It’s Time for an Open Alternative. ⇒
10 May 2010, mid-afternoon
I think i’m going to kill my Facebook account soon. They are even bigger punks now than they were when I finally caved and joined, and they were pretty big punks back then. It’s both scary and impressive that more people don’t nuke their accounts. It’s not like they are that subtle with their privacy changes.
This link was found via Angry Robot.This is a post from my link log: If you click the title of this post you will be taken the web page I am discussing.
Privacy is a mess. If you put anything online in a digital way, there is some way for it leak out whether you want it or not since it’s easy to copy/forward, e.g. a ‘private’ email thread can turn into How Not To Handle A Resignation Gracefully
Sure, maybe cryptography field can perhaps help with this, but look at how well DRM is working out for the entertainment industry – I’m skeptical that there is a practical, general solution here.
What exactly is the “Open” alternative? Any competitors are keen to monetize their users (they are businesses after all) or they end up as large committees which don’t make progress (e.g. C++ 0X…) or they are interesting ‘bottom-up’ ideas no one uses (e.g. PGP) or are large organizations themselves that lack a profit motive, but just run into the similar management problems (e.g. today’s Wikipedia news)
So if you don’t want your (digital) life shared, either (a) don’t put it online anywhere (i.e. it’s unshareable) or (b) trust your friends/acquaintances and be mindful of the services you use (hard!) and hope for the best.
by Ryan on May 10 2010, 9:54 pm #
Clearly Facebook at one time was mindful with people’s privacy though. I think the issue is that they baited people into joining their site by telling them only your friends will see your shit, and then once people were on their site quietly (and not so quietly) changing the privacy rules. The site makes setting up your privacy trickier than it needs to be because it’s to their advantage people share more than they should.
And i’m obviously in the just put shit you want to share online and fuck Facebook camp.
by ramanan on May 11 2010, 8:28 am #