Comments on: Increasing Facebook privacy settings and the Instant Personalization

By: Facebook Diss|Like: Designing Digital Warning Signs « Giladon-line

Facebook Diss|Like: Designing Digital Warning Signs « Giladon-line — Wed, 05 May 2010 07:57:28 +0000

[...] Raul Pacheco hits the spot when he writes that Facebook’s actions are ‘not enough for us to care’: There has been a lot of debate online about how Facebook keeps making it more difficult for users to keep their privacy. My question to everyone is — if Facebook is that “evil,” why are we all still using it? Why not be completely democratic and demonstrate (with our vote, e.g. with our not having a Facebook account) that this loss of privacy is unacceptable? The answer is — because not enough of us care. If the millions of users of Facebook really cared that much about their privacy, they would make the Big Brother/Sister accountable. But in a society that is valuing privacy less and less, accountability has become an afterthought and not mainstream. Sadly, that also means that we have lost the power of protecting our privacy to commercial interests. [...]

By: Minna Van

Minna Van — Fri, 30 Apr 2010 11:32:07 +0000

Social media helps people who are increasingly working longer hours to keep in touch with the outer tier of acquaintances to ensure casual contact through bite-sized random life updates.

It is a valuable tool but people just have to treat Facebook or Twitter like their nosy aunt Mary* – don’t say anything you don’t want coming back to haunt you.

*Name has been purposely changed to protect identity of nosy relative

By: Erika Rathje

Erika Rathje — Sun, 25 Apr 2010 07:22:15 +0000

It’s really disturbing and also maybe a bit useless that even when you turn off “instant personalization,” your friends can still share and see information about you. What is this information? You know, I might go in there right now and just delete all the “about me” stuff because it doesn’t need to be laid out on the table. Granted I like having personalized ads because I’m less annoyed when they’re accurate (I can ignore them), but I could just as well fake it or put in only a very slight amount of data to shape those ads.

It’s incredibly shameful that the default privacy setting is “wide open” essentially. Just make a copy of the keys to our houses why don’t they…

Teens should be made acutely aware of this because they will likely regret it later. I’m just glad I was done post-secondary before this tool became widely adopted.

Do we stay on to keep in touch with people? Or, like I ranted about Thursday night, is it just an excuse to maintain a very minimal, superficial connection (“relationship”) with a lot of people?

By: Christopher Parsons

Christopher Parsons — Fri, 23 Apr 2010 20:09:06 +0000

I disagree – it’s not so much that people don’t care, it’s that there is a conflict between caring and a network effect going on. IF there were another service that offered similar features as facebook (not exactly the same though) and IF at least 5 of your friends that you cared about joined that service with you then there would be a substantial decrease in the power of Facebook’s network effect (5 friends is the number from the ex-CEO of Friendfeed).

The hope is that advertisers get spanked, badly, to the point where Facebook’s newest invasive processes are seen as economically valueless. Unfortunately, for that to happen there would need to be very real regulatory change in the US..

By: Kemp

Kemp — Fri, 23 Apr 2010 19:39:12 +0000

Facebook now offers “Evil” as a colour scheme, seriously.

PHOTO EVIDENCE: http://ow.ly/i/1dSI