I've always felt that average people want to be anonymous. The internet is a place to remove your filters and be honest about what you think. You don't have to worry about people judging you and treating you differently based on your ideas. Facebook doesn't solve that problem at all, it exacerbates it. Facebook is a place you go to be judged by everyone you know. People fundamentally don't want that drama.
Facebook is what a social site looks like when you don't have anonymity - and I don't like it.
People end up self-censoring about 3/4 of the things they want to say on Facebook so they don't offend anyone. It's an intellectually barren wasteland of harmless platitudes and abandoned thoughts.
I appreciate where you were coming from with this idea, but I like a little anonymity to my Internet. It's the truth spice.
Facebook is not anonymous. That is enforced and by design, and fairly important in distinguishing it from other social networks. The rest of your points are still fair though.
If you need to say something in the public domain that can't be traced back to your own identity, don't say it on Facebook.
The entire point of Facebook is that there is an easily identified one-to-one correspondence between your Facebook contacts and people in the real world. If people are allowed to become effectively anonymous then it fundamentally changes this experience.
I don't think it's fair to say a lack of anonymity or other mistakes are killing Facebook. It very may well be true that mistakes killed the experience for you, but the truth is that most people are not overly concerned with the lack of privacy on their social networks.
I think people online often mistake a vocal minority pushing for privacy settings on this network as a reflection of the wishes of everyone. Truth be told, most people are indifferent to the matter.
I said nothing about Facebook. Facebook is a manifestation of a social network, and thus cannot be private by definition. All it does is allow people to spread things, and to do it efficiently as possible; it has no other use. Privacy exists going into the Internet, not on the Internet.
But the Internet is not the problem. Instead, the problem is this attitude:
> If someone in my circle of friends shares something with the outside world that they shouldn't have, then they are in the wrong and will have to accept whatever the punishment is
This isn't how the real world works.
Your friends have other trusted friends that aren't you. The separation isn't between "my circle of friends" and "the outside world"; there is no "outside world." Your circle of friends each has their own circles of friends, who have their own, and those circles, together, comprise the entirety of the world. There is no separation; no barrier there. It's a problem of incorrect perspective to put a dividing line around the people connected to you and no one else—because, to everyone else, that's not where the line is. It's around them, and their friends.
You'll ask your friend for advice on something, who will delegate the question to their own friend. You tell someone a secret and ten other people will find out, all in complete confidence. You'll end up doing embarrassing things in other people's wedding pictures, or being captured in a photo alongside them in a bar. This isn't something that can remain private, because these aren't facts about you. They're stories occurring in other people's worlds, in other people's circles—they just happen, tangentially, to have you as a property of them.
Now, usually, all this leaked information doesn't come back to you—people have the sensibility to keep the secret secret. And the world goes on that way just fine. Ten people will know about something embarrassing you did, but, because they are aware of the rules of our culture, they won't tell you they know, and you can go on leading your life pretending nobody knows.
The problem with the privacy after the advent of the Internet is not that these people now know your secrets. The problem with the Internet is that it makes the slip-ups of the third-parties public, permanent, and irrevocable. It vocalizes the maid-and-butler conversations that we all managed to pretend weren't happening, and, in doing so, ruins our collective facade of propriety.
And, unless we throw away everything about how the Internet works, we're just going to have to learn to work around that permanence. If anything, we need to kill the desire for sites like Facebook, not Facebook itself; we need to remove ourselves from our collective lecterns and podiums before we ruminate upon others' secrets. And that's hard–that's changing human nature, or at the very least, the nature of Western society. But that's what we have to do, if we want to keep this gift of a worldwide network of permanently-remembering machines alive.
(And note—what Facebook is doing right now has nothing to do with all of this. Everything that Facebook has done to "decrease" the privacy level of its userbase could have been done by a third-party by collecting the login details of a few not-particularly-privacy-conscious[1] volunteers and then spidering Facebook from their viewpoints, re-building its social graph within their own servers. This could still be done today, and is not an exploit that can be patched in any way, shape or form. As I said: social networks are inherently public.)
Facebook does not represent the end of online anonymity because Facebook is one single site. There is nothing objectionable about one site having a rule to use your real name or not at all, and it is the height of entitlement to claim otherwise. (It's popular, so now they have to do X Y and Z)
Doubly so given how granular the controls are regarding who can see what. Sharing on Facebook is a completely opt-in process, so if you don't want your boss seing your pictures, you have a litany of options, including lists, person-to-person sharing, blocking, and not friending them in the first place.
The problem is that this requires a modicum of effort, and people don't want to have to expend that effort. They want to be able to blast everything out there and just kinda hope that it doesn't get them in trouble. It takes effort to use stuff that's not Facebook.
"Facebook has value, but no matter what your privacy settings are set to, no matter what you delete, always assume that anything you write or do on Facebook - in any context - will be embarrassingly public. 1) Because it will and 2) because it just makes life easier."
The problem here is that I do consider everything I do on the Internet to be public, but most average people don't. This is why I don't have a Facebook, which admittedly is probably a big killer for my social life in my age group being a late teenager. People in their late teens/early twenties are reckless when it comes to the Internet and I simply can't risk being associated with any of that.
So if you're the victim of abuse or a member of a persecuted minority, you should hide at home with your shame and not participate in the social aspects of society?
What is this, the 18th century?
You claim to only be suggesting opsec, while ignoring that such extreme opsec (aka, not participating in many aspects of society) wouldn't be necessary if Facebook didn't insist of removing privacy (aka "the effective capacity to misrepresent yourself").
The power of the internet is that it lets you publish what you want, when you want. This should enable people to act like their true self or seek the support of others. Facebook seems to think that these are bad things that need to be prevented by forcing everyone to id themselves.
Blame Facebook for creating this hazard instead of blaming the victims for wanting to participate in social activities like a normal human.
Nobody really wanted their entire social network to be public; Facebook kind of removed the option. Even those who think they have nothing to hide don't want this.
Facebook doesn't invade anyone's privacy. They aren't going into your house and rifling through your things. People post things on facebook because they want other people to see them. If you don't want to do that, then don't use facebook.
You can't stop other people from talking about you, or from taking pictures of you or relating stories that involve you. That's always been a part of social life. If you consider that to be an invasion of your privacy, then leave society and live as a hermit. It probably won't be fun, but it will be very private.
I know several people who don't use facebook, myself included, because they just aren't interested in the service that it provides. Philosophical concerns about the nature of privacy don't really factor into it. The social fashions about what's cool and what isn't cool will change with the winds. It isn't worth paying attention to. If facebook or any other social software is valuable to you, then good, use it. If not, no sense complaining about what other people decide to do with their time.
Silly. The internet has plenty of potential for government abuse, but Facebook gives governments a single entity to talk to whose sole purpose is to centralize your personal information.
If you're paranoid, the Internet at large can be pretty anonymous: proxies, encrypted communications, etc. It's just a communications network and you can make it nearly as secure as you want.
It's a heck of a lot easier to be anonymous on the Internet than it is in the real world. Being anonymous on Facebook doesn't even compute, and any privacy options you select are at their discretion to provide and honor.
Like some others I assume that anything I put online is public information, but not everyone has this view. For the naive user a site like Facebook appears to be just about you and your small circle of friends. Especially for people who are younger and perhaps not so worldly it would be incredibly easy to post things on Facebook which you might come to regret a few years later - especially if future employers and insurance companies are trawling through your data and looking at your connections.
I don't think it's good enough for the folks at Facebook just to say "Privacy is dead. Get over it". In the real world those people who are not rampant exhibitionists do want and expect to have some level of privacy - some degree of control over what information they give to who. Ultimately it's about the dignity and integrity of the individual.
I don't care. I stopped caring about my privacy. Nobody will hurt me by knowing too much about me. Facebook can have all of my life, because nothing is private for me.
It is a great tool for keeping up with friends, it allows to cultivate friendships a lot easier than anything before. We can have a lot of friends when we don't keep secrets, because by being open with your weaknesses you create new friend, not an enemy. You create enemies with secrets and lies.
The fact that you can be going about your regular Internet life and not know if something you do will or won't be posted to a social network is a huge problem. Facebook's approach seems to be to boil the frog toward people not giving a crap about privacy at all, to voluntarily give it up as a reflex or instinctual action, or not to notice that it is already gone, all under the cover of "being friendly." I mean, you aren't such a grump that you don't want to tell your friends what you're doing, right?
On Facebook you can't quickly create an anonymous account to say whatever you want to your 500 friends because that account wouldn't be friends with them. You end up censoring yourself because it's friends, family, coworkers, and romantic interests on there reading your posts.
Rape is the headline-grabbing problem, but the real problem is a far more mundane loss of privacy. Do you really want everybody in all your social circles to know exactly where you're partying Friday nights, and exactly whose house you actually ended up sleeping at? Or if you have no problem with that, insert your choice of thing you don't really care to broadcast to everybody.
A nontrivial part of the reason why I have no interest in being on facebook is the amount of my family that is on it. And I'm not even doing or saying anything that my family will particularly find outrageous like some people, I wouldn't be leaking a sexual preference or something I don't want to reveal to them at this time. I simply don't care to run my every opinion, location, preference, and activity past them, and then have to hear about their opinions about it.
To be clear, I'm 33 and have long since stopped caring about their opinions... but I still don't want to listen to them, either. I'm very closely related to some people in my family whom I can't really get away from who are virtually incapable of having a thought without saying it out loud. YMMV. And I am by far not a pathological example... I'm doing this more out of my personal convenience than anything else, there's nothing that I feel I have to hide. What of those that do?
And if you're really having a hard time imagining what that sort of thing may be... this very post is an example. The person I'm referring to will never find it here. Ever. I can speak freely here, at least as long as I don't name names which I wouldn't anyhow. I'm not in a hurry to live in world where that goes away. Online balkanization isn't all bad. It isn't even mostly bad.
Facebook wasn't designed to be public either, it has always been known for being a walled garden where you share stuff with people you choose. Someone might pass something on to stranger but that's no different from having a chat on the phone. That doesn't mean every word I say should be broadcasted to the world.
It's not about embarrassing pictures either. A mom could post pictures of her kids without having her abusive ex-husband commenting on them. I could stay in touch with friends and relatives overseas without exposing to much of my personal life to the people I work with.
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