I had occasion today to re-examine the benefits and dangers of facebook. I recognize, and am constantly told that it is beneficial and everyone is using it, and it allows connection on an unprecedented level, that people can share ideas that spread like wildfire and connect over the things they like. Here are some recent New York Times articles pointing out the pros and cons of facebook. It seems that having a large number of people whom you may not know access your information can lead to problems down the line, with recruiters, employers, etc. And having murky obligations to people because they are a ‘friend’ or are ‘unfriended’ can make relationships unnecessarily complicated.
-Friends, Until I Delete You
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/29/fashion/29facebook.html?scp=3&sq=facebook%20unfriend&st=cse
deleting friends does not generate a notification of any sort, leaving members to discover they’ve been unfriended only when they find they no longer have access to someone’s profile. It can be a jarring experience, especially considering that the person who dumped you at some point either requested you as a friend or accepted your request …
While many trivial actions do prompt Facebook to post an alert to all your friends… striking someone off your list simply is not one of them.
…Of course, not all unfriendings are equal. There seem to be several varieties, ranging from the completely impersonal to the utterly vindictive.
…On Facebook, as in life, no unfriending is as fraught with pitfalls as the one you really mean.
…The two had a falling out …During an emotional late-night moment, she clicked the “remove”…“Now I really, really regret it”
+In India, Using Facebook to Catch Scofflaw Drivers
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/02/technology/02traffic.html?ref=facebook_inc
… two months ago, and almost immediately residents became digital informants, posting photos of their fellow drivers violating traffic laws
… acknowledged that it was possible photos could be manipulated to incriminate someone who was not actually breaking the law. But, he said, drivers can contest the tickets if they think they were wrongly issued. The police advise residents not to let personal animosity influence their photo-taking, and not to do anything to compromise their own security, like antagonizing law-breakers while snapping photos.
-Price of Facebook Privacy? Start Clicking
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/13/technology/personaltech/13basics.html?_r=1
Which is longer, the United States Constitution or Facebook’s Privacy Policy? -the latter
The new opt-out settings certainly are complex. Facebook users who hope to make their personal information private should be prepared to spend a lot of time pressing a lot of buttons.
-Germany Plans Limits on Facebook Use in Hiring
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/26/business/global/26fbook.html?scp=3&sq=facebook&st=cse
the German government on Wednesday proposed placing restrictions on employers who want to use Facebook profiles when recruiting…
There are currently no rules governing how companies use Facebook data…
-How to Use Facebook’s New Location Feature
Apple has built impressive location detection into its newer iPhones. They have GPS, plus they sniff the air for local Wi-Fi network names and compare them to a map of known network locations…
Facebook will query your iPhone for its location, and prompt you with a list of nearby places that it knows… Tap the screen to set your location, and all your Facebook friends will be able to see…
Second, Facebook Places lets you see where your friends are. …iPhone app will pop up a list of who else is nearby…The end goal is obvious: You can contact and meet up with friends who are near you.
Here are the two issues that will surely bother the most people: First, if you are at a location but have not checked in, Facebook friends at the same location can check you in themselves
-How to Hide From Friends You Don’t Like
…it’s inevitable that you’ll be friended by someone you know, but with whom you don’t want to share your online life… how do you avoid them without the awkwardness of unfriending them?
Facebook has made it easy to hide other members’ status updates…
When you write a status update of your own, look for the lock-shaped icon below and to the right of the text input box…There are two ways to exclude people.
+The Language of Fakebook
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/15/fashion/15Culture.html?ref=facebook_inc
Lauren Mechling and Laura Moser have been writing a clever serialized novel on Slate called “My Darklyng.”Their innovation: the plot unfolds not just in text but on Facebook and Twitter.
…[it] offers a brilliant commentary on how fictional teenagers are on Facebook…A 14-year-old I talked to about this sent me a message that pretty much sums it up: “I write more enthusiastically on Facebook than I actually am in real life. Like if I see something remotely funny I might say ‘HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHA,’ when really there is no expression on my face.”
…Facebook gives the exhibitionism, the pure theater of those years, a whole other level of stage.
…You can find polite little girls cursing like sailors on Facebook. Everything is louder, more ardent, capitalized. This is a way of dramatizing or raising the stakes on even the most inane or banal exchange
…Being “friends” on Facebook is more of a fantasy or imitation or shadow of friendship than the traditional real thing. Friendship on Facebook bears about the same relation to friendship in life, as being run over by a car in a cartoon resembles being run over by a car in life. Facebook is friendship minus the one on one conversation, minus the moment alone at a party in a corner with someone
…Somewhere in the gap between status posting and the person [they are] in their room at night is life itself. So fiction is the right response, the right commentary, the right point to be making about who we are in these dangerously consuming media, in these easy addictive nano-connections.
-The Web Means the End of Forgetting
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/25/magazine/25privacy-t2.html?ref=facebook_inc
we are only beginning to understand the costs of an age in which so much of what we say, and of what others say about us, goes into our permanent — and public — digital files. The fact that the Internet never seems to forget is threatening, at an almost existential level, our ability to control our identities… In traditional societies, where missteps are observed but not necessarily recorded, the limits of human memory ensure that people’s sins are eventually forgotten…the permanent memory bank of the Web increasingly means there are no second chances — no opportunities to escape a scarlet letter in your digital past…far from giving us a new sense of control over the face we present to the world, the Internet is shackling us to everything that we have ever said, or that anyone has said about us, making the possibility of digital self-reinvention seem like an ideal from a distant era.
a photo …showed her at a party wearing a pirate hat and drinking from a plastic cup, with the caption “Drunken Pirate.” After discovering the page, her supervisor …said she was promoting drinking… As a result, days before Snyder’s scheduled graduation, the university denied her a teaching degree.
Sued that…violated her First Amendment rights by penalizing her for her (perfectly legal) after-hours behavior. But in 2008, a federal district judge rejected the claim, saying that because Snyder was a public employee whose photo didn’t relate to matters of public concern, her “Drunken Pirate” post was not protected speech…A challenge of…how best to live our lives in a world where the Internet records everything and forgets nothing — where every online photo, status update, Twitter post and blog entry by and about us can be stored forever.
Other examples: 16-year-old British girl who was fired from her office job for complaining on Facebook, “I’m so totally bored!!”
Canadian psychotherapist who tried to enter the United States but was turned away …[for] an article in a philosophy journal describing his experiments 30 years ago with L.S.D.
U.S. recruiters and human-resource professionals report that their companies require them to do online research …— including search engines, social-networking sites…Seventy percent of U.S. recruiters report that they have rejected candidates because of information found online
the Library of Congress recently announced that it will be acquiring — and permanently storing — the entire archive of public Twitter posts since 2006.
A Manhattan woman…she was afraid of being tagged in online photos because it might reveal that she wears only two outfits when out on the town…“You have movie-star issues,” she said, “and you’re just a person.”
Last December, the company announced that parts of user profiles that had previously been private — including every user’s friends, relationship status and family relations — would become public
In February, the European Union helped finance a campaign called “Think B4 U post!” that urges young people to consider the “potential consequences” of publishing photos of themselves or their friends without “thinking carefully” and asking permission.
Those who think that their online reputations have been unfairly tarnished by an isolated incident or two now have a practical option: consulting a firm like ReputationDefender, which promises to clean up your online image.
Web. 3.0 — a world in which user-generated content is combined with a new layer of data aggregation… For example, the Facebook application Photo Finder, by Face.com, uses facial-recognition … to allow you to locate any photo of yourself or a friend on Facebook, regardless of whether the photo was “tagged” — that is, the individual in the photo was identified by name. At the moment, Photo Finder allows you to identify only people on your contact list, but [will soon] almost certainly challenge our expectation of anonymity in public.
an exclusive bar on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, requires potential members to sign an agreement promising not to blog about the bar’s goings on or to post photos on social-networking sites
[future legal options:] laws forbidding people to breach confidences could be expanded to allow you to sue your Facebook friends if they share your embarrassing photos or posts in violation of your privacy settings.
experiments about the “decay time” … of good and bad information — in other words, whether people discount positive information about you more quickly and heavily than they discount negative information about you. His research group’s preliminary results suggest that if rumors spread about something good you did 10 years ago, like winning a prize, they will be discounted; but if rumors spread about something bad that you did 10 years ago, like driving drunk, that information has staying power.
What people seem to want is not simply control over their privacy settings; they want control over their online reputations… of course, an unrealistic fantasy.
but a humane society values privacy, because it allows people to cultivate different aspects of their personalities in different contexts
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