Facebook used to be a site that I visited when I was bored or had downtime. It was a diversion that could be accessed at any given moment, and then put back away when it’s purpose was served. The problem is that now, you can’t put Facebook away. You can close your browser window and continue on to surf other sites, but no matter where you go, you’re back at Facebook again. If I’m reading an article on cnn.com, my friends’ comments are listed to the right of the article. If I’m visiting (seemingly) random blogs, I’m being encouraged to be the first of my friends to “Like” the posting. Enough. I’m unplugging from the Facebook version of The Matrix.
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Facebook’s recent modifications to their privacy policies is causing concern for a lot of people, and for good reason. Facebook is encouraging third-party sites and developers to leverage their developer platform to gain deliver a more social experience for their users. Facebook is referring to this new practice as “Instant Personalization”, and it means that sites will be able to pull profile information about their visitors, as well as about the visitor’s friends. That last sentence deserves some attention because it is possibly one of the bigger threats to privacy that I have seen done out-in-the-open on the web.
Essentially what this means is that if your friend visits a site that you have no affiliation with whatsoever, that friend can pass your personal information on to that site. Meaning that whatever permission that you had previously extended to your friend to use your profile details have now been extended to a site with which you have no affiliation, and with whom you have no knowledge.
This attempted increase in reach is startling. Not starting because Facebook is doing it (research has shown that adding personal information to advertisements results in significantly higher click-thru) but startling because it’s being allowed in the first place. Google received FAR more attention for their Buzz Privacy Snafu, and that was a much smaller risk to my privacy than what Facebook is attempting.
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Jim Gaffigan has a bit where he observes that fast-food ordering has been reduced to shouting out a number “yeah, give me a number TWO” and he goes on to theorize that soon we’ll be reduced to grunts. That’s the direction we are headed with the new craze for “location-based” applications and services.
Hailed by technology evangelists, and feared by privacy advocates, location based social networking apps are popping up on Facebook and Twitter faster than weeds in my front yard. The apps themselves don’t offend me, they seem to be reasonably attractive, and Lord knows there are enough of them to choose from (loopt, foursquare, check.in, etc.) I’m not even that worried about the privacy aspect (http://robmenow.com/) What concerns (depresses) me more is the continuing devolution of communication. The trend toward grunting is depressing:
- Writing letters to a friend “Dear Madam,—I have been shown in the files of the War…”
- Sending instant messages to your friend “Josh: You going to the game tonight?”
- Tweeting (or status updating) “I hate Mondays, but I had a great weekend”
It’s difficult to imagine this devolving any further, as we have now reduced communication from the written word to simply pushing a button that tells people your geographic location. “I’m here” ”now I’m here” ”now I’m somewhere else” Read the rest of this entry »
If you’ve been spending any time online over the past year, then you’ve undoubtedly noticed a disturbing trend. With the ubiquity of social networking, people are less likely to be concerned with what information they expose online. They have the illusion that they are sharing information with a select group of friends, and that gives them a level of comfort that is unwarranted. In the past few years, it has been fairly common to hear in the news about people losing jobs/relationships/reputations over things that they (or others) post about themselves online.
As can be expected, there are elements out there that have found a way to monetize this lack of caution. Recently a disturbing number of “online directories” have surfaced that allow you to search for people online. These sites all tend to have the same aggregated data; littered with equal part accurate details and complete errors. Read the rest of this entry »
