The creepiness that is Facebook

[Project Willow]

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/10128476.stm

Facebook challenged by ambitious upstarts

By Jonathan Frewin Technology reporter,
Facebook has come under increased scrutiny over its privacy policies

The controversy over Facebook's privacy policy is helping those developing alternatives to the social network.

Funding and users are flowing to services that claim to put members in charge of their personal data.

The rivals range from start-ups to more established firms working on the specifications for an ecosystem of open social networks.

Experts say Facebook may have little to worry about, despite 11,000 people pledging to quit Facebook on 31 May.

"Nobody has reached anything like critical mass in the same social platform area," said Lee Bryant, from social technology consultancy Headshift.

"Facebook is like an entire web operating system," he said. ....

More at the link.

Facebook -- for everyone who loves small talk, looking at photo albums, idiotic conversation, doing the Jumble, and family newsletters. Having your personal data collected and living your life like a zoo animal behind glass is just a bonus.

That may be true for some people, but for me, I had no choice but to join. Organizing the care for my dying and far too shortly departed friend, I found that there was an entire Facebook page dedicated to her. The woman who set it up had been on the outs with my friend through her illness, but their circle, including friends going back almost 20 years, were consoling themselves through that page. Even though I'd avoided the service like the plague, I joined, at least in order to send out reminders of events or, like say, photos of the memorial for those who couldn't attend.

Once I was there I found that the entire visual art community of Seattle was using FB as a marketing tool. It was all over at that point, I couldn't not be on it. Critics, curators, and other writers, local and national are on it. Surprisingly, it's the one place you might actually get their attention with a comment.

Scroll up and take a look at one of the articles posted by AD. It presents a different take on the privacy issue and outlines what it calls the response factor. I don't often get responses on Facebook itself, but I do get them later when I see people in person. For a single person, that takes out some of the sting of isolation, I know that some people are paying attention. If you think of how humans evolved, the idea of privacy, at least concerning what would be known publicly if we lived in smaller populations, communities, or tribes, is a relatively new one.

I'll give another example of benefit, a number of people, including some long lost school friends whom I suspect may have been trafficking victims themselves but who would never seek out this venue, are now aware of the Franklin Scandal book.

As long as there is no other mass appeal tech in the offing to replace both the networking advantages and visibility payoffs Facebook provides, it will obtain, no matter how much it abuses its users. I am glad there are new services being developed.

I also learned for myself however, after about the third time of course, never friend a love interest, never. Well, unless you get engaged or something.

[Avalon]

Facebook's management and usability manages to have that charming blend of evil and incompetence. Their conception of privacy is vile.

But it's a useful tool, and like all tools, it's how you use it. This is how I use it:

I've got a little over 100 "friends" at the moment. My list of people to eventually friend has a couple dozen people on it, but I haven't gotten around to it yet, and I have enough to keep up with at the moment.

About half the friends are Pagan. Some are fairly local (i.e., within an hour's drive), some I know from a private yearly gathering that I've been going to for almost 20 years that some people drive 7 hours to attend. Some I know from national Pagan organizations or online. There are a few strangers who've asked to friend whose Pagan bona fides I've checked out before doing so, and several that I've friended because I really like their postings on conversations I've been involved with.

I've friended my daughters (one reluctantly), two of my 4 sisters, a couple of my daughters' cousins. I'll probably add a couple of my cousins. Several of my kids' friends have friended me, as well as a mother of one of my friends (I've never met her). There are 3 people I've slept with at some point in the past 40 years, probably a couple other old lovers I might add.

There's a handful of college friends, who'd I'd been out of touch with for decades. I still have letters from some of them from back in the seventies, which I'm planning to send back to them as a kind of distributed time capsule opening.

Business colleagues? Only a couple, one I haven't seen for years. Curiously, the other has become a good friend on Facebook, but while we'd attended the same business event every year for years, we'd never met. Turned out she married one of my high school classmates, was several years younger than us in HS.

Most surprising has been the high school friends. I was an introverted artist and didn't know these kids before I moved there before high school, so I don't have the length or depth of relationships and history many of them have together. Yet I seem to be the only one who can look at the old crowd photos from 40 years ago and put a lot of names to the faces, even though I didn't personally know them (it was a large HS, 500 kids in each grade).

One of these days when I find where I've stashed it, I've got a box of vintage photos I bought at an estate sale in the old home town. Before I donate it to the historical society, I'll digitize them and put them up on Facebook to be identified, so that anyone who wants copies can have them. I have a file of permission slips for an activity that my grandfather was advisor for in a high school in the 30's. I'd love to get them to their owners or survivors, but if not, at least I can digitize the information and put it online in genealogical and historical sites, as there is address information that may help someone who is looking for their family members.

There's that meme that is out there that the old high school dynamics keep playing out for decades. I'm not seeing it on Facebook, not with our generation at least. I look in the old yearbooks, and very few of the old high school leadership seems to have continued to lead, other than a few who were clearly on the national and international track then and still are. Some of them have no googleable presence at all. Some of my best friends from back then are on, but we're not close now. Yet I've got warm friendships developing with some people I only knew as acquaintances back then, if at all. I may set up a Facebook group for artists from our school (which had an excellent art department), for mutual support and an interest in sharing what excites us.

We've had a couple of spouses die, and having that visible support on Facebook seems to really help the bereaved. And just at a personal level, it's surprising how touching base with a "like" helps connect. I like seeing the quotidien details of our lives that wouldn't necessarily come up in other contexts, and seeing friends from different spheres talking who otherwise wouldn't meet until my memorial service.

Most of my online life is pretty transparent, and outside of this and a few other forums where I prefer to use a handle, I've always posted under my own name. and for the most part have not had any serious trouble. My working assumption is that nothing in email or anywhere else online is truly private, and that no relationship is guaranteed to last, other than that with the dead.

If we can offer informed and thoughtful conversation, I think we have a responsibility to model it elsewhere in the world. While Facebook is full of mainstream crap, it is also an extraordinary opportunity for us to spread our own memes to those who wouldn't normally venture into forums like this.

[American Dream]

Avalon, your approach makes sense to me.

One of the prime tenets of personal security is that each person chooses their own level, based on their own particular situation and their own wants and needs.

My personal feeling is that it doesn't serve to foster unnecessary paranoia but neither does it serve to foster intense transparency if one is involved with sensitive things.

So it's largely a question of balance, and discretion...

[lightningBugout]

As far as things like party directions and event announcements (esp. impromptu stuff), I don't know what I would do without FB. That is, in lieu of a simpler and more functional social networking paradigm (like what Diaspora is promising).

The story of FB is sort of odd, to my thinking. Seems mostly simple chance that led to their market dominance. There's very little meaningful innovation beyond the rudimentary social networking functionality pioneered by Myspace and Friendster. And fuck knows its not well implemented. I strongly predict their obsolescence within a few years. The Diaspora video above puts it nicely - when we communicate in real time we don't send our message to a company and ask they forward it to a friend, so why should the web be any different?

Compare to Google who literally changed the world. Their code is impeccable. Google maps was not just a game changer but a game *ender.* I worked in a related industry at the time and was developing something that might've competed with their app. Yet, the day I first saw it, it was clear they had solved a problem that many of us were working on. And done so not just brilliantly but with an incredibly simple and incredibly elegant solution that I, chagrined to say, would not have taken seriously if someone had proposed it to me.

For that matter, compare Google to Apple. Google is clearly hungry for alot more personal data than I would like to give them. But they are developer-friendly as can be. And they'd never, ever give us the weird, controlling powerplays Jobs has been of late. No Flash on the Ipad simply because Jobs hates Adobe? Bullshit. Web designers love to talk smack about Flash but essentially every single one of the top-tier design firms in the world uses Flash consistently. And the content moderation of the Iphone app store is disgusting. According to Gawker, Jobs has made statements promoting the Iphone as "freeing you from porn." Yuck. I'll implement my own social control, thanks.

Anyways, FB seems like a very odd throwback to the dot com bubble when fortunes were made and lost at hyper-speed and value was completely preposterous and inflated.

I'll be very happy to see them go.

[DeltaDawn]

Really would like some insight to this one

Went to FB and had a friend request, found we had one mutual friend, so obviously my info came from his actual mail account. I say this because, FB is in my name, not husbands, he goes by a nickname and very few people know his real name. The mutual friend is someone who knows his real name, because we aren't as much friends as fellow workers in the community. Any way: Went to this request's page BP Bob and this message awaited:

"Welcome my new friends (someone we don't know), (my name) and (husbands name) er, I mean (husbands nickname). Now you can hear all the real truth about the alledged oil spilled from your trusted information source BP Bob. No more vague answers or lies. You know that I will always speak the lies, oh er I mean the truth just as I did in Iraq. Ali willing. I'm going surfing this weekend so you'll here the latest on Monday. Ali be with you." His stats are born in 1945. Hometown: Baghdad. Looking for: Networking/ yes to Political and Religion? High School: Baghdad High. Company: British Petroleum

So asked the son about it and at first he said it's a phishing bot but then said, no it can't be a bot because they had your information and bots send out general information to many recipients or something like that. Still leaves me wondering what in the hell???? At first I thought it might be a joke or something, because I don't even know who Ali is, but even if there's an answer for that, this mutual friend would not be someone who would play a prank on me. Any ideas?

[alwyn]

not to add to the paranoia, but all of a sudden, I can't post on facebook, I get run into a 'capcha' security check that won't load. takeover by hostile force? or just the usual bad programming? Someone is trying to load public opinion one way or the other, sounds like it's getting pointed in your case. malicious hackers are afoot, fer sure...

[Sweejak]

DeltaDawn, I think it's a bot, I get those and they are creepy. I've sent them to trash with a rule written for the address from which they came which is different from a real FB address if you open and look at the full header.

I had one which showed my other "friends", but some of them weren't on FB. Ever. And my only communication with them was with email, and in person, and on the land line telephone, (though he may have been on a cell). Or maybe it was thru his Picasa site. I thought it had to be legit because it showed my friends, real friends, but what we are seeing is personalized phising.

My thought was that they people behind this had broken into someone's webmail account and scooped the addresses. I rarely use webmail, I stay away from the cloud as much as I can for storing anything important. I try to keep my address book offline, but how useful is that when everybody else has it online?

[justdrew]

Really would like some insight to this one

Went to FB and had a friend request, found we had one mutual friend, so obviously my info came from his actual mail account. I say this because, FB is in my name, not husbands, he goes by a nickname and very few people know his real name. The mutual friend is someone who knows his real name, because we aren't as much friends as fellow workers in the community. Any way: Went to this request's page BP Bob and this message awaited:

"Welcome my new friends (someone we don't know), (my name) and (husbands name) er, I mean (husbands nickname). Now you can hear all the real truth about the alledged oil spilled from your trusted information source BP Bob. No more vague answers or lies. You know that I will always speak the lies, oh er I mean the truth just as I did in Iraq. Ali willing. I'm going surfing this weekend so you'll here the latest on Monday. Ali be with you." His stats are born in 1945. Hometown: Baghdad. Looking for: Networking/ yes to Political and Religion? High School: Baghdad High. Company: British Petroleum

So asked the son about it and at first he said it's a phishing bot but then said, no it can't be a bot because they had your information and bots send out general information to many recipients or something like that. Still leaves me wondering what in the hell???? At first I thought it might be a joke or something, because I don't even know who Ali is, but even if there's an answer for that, this mutual friend would not be someone who would play a prank on me. Any ideas?

sounds like maybe this acquaintance who sent you the friend request may have had their account hacked (password guessed). I would contact them by another communication channel, like a phone or meeting them somewhere and tell them about it. Sounds like this "BP Bob" has broken into their account.

did the friend request come in an email or a message on facebook?

privacy settings be damned, information leaks out to operators of the plugins and games and such, each of who is also subject to having whatever info they've harvested hacked from them.

[Avalon]

Went on FB tonight and found a high school friend had uploaded a picture of the two of us at our high school graduation, over 35 years ago this week. I don't think my mom took any pictures at graduation, and there are only a handful of pictures of me in high school. It's actually a very nice picture of me, and I'm thrilled to see it.

[DeltaDawn]

Thanks Justdrew, just shot an email out to the mutual friend, because fairly sure, he never had intentions of anyone getting into his personal email account or someone contacting us through his FB account.

Avalon, so glad to hear your news!!! My first FB non-local contact was with High School friend that I was soooo pleased to have found, having looked for her for years!! FB is a wonderful tool, just a little 'creepy' sometimes lol!! Of course, this comes from a VERY paranoid individual

[freemason9]

i see no purpose in facebook, aside from announcing party invitations and spreading the word about your favorite type of cake

[freemason9]

i see no purpose in facebook, aside from announcing party invitations and spreading the word about your favorite type of cake

oh, and setting yourself up for future litigation/prosecution. i almost forgot that part

[freemason9]

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/10128476.stm

Facebook challenged by ambitious upstarts

By Jonathan Frewin Technology reporter,
Facebook has come under increased scrutiny over its privacy policies

The controversy over Facebook's privacy policy is helping those developing alternatives to the social network.

Funding and users are flowing to services that claim to put members in charge of their personal data.

The rivals range from start-ups to more established firms working on the specifications for an ecosystem of open social networks.

Experts say Facebook may have little to worry about, despite 11,000 people pledging to quit Facebook on 31 May.

"Nobody has reached anything like critical mass in the same social platform area," said Lee Bryant, from social technology consultancy Headshift.

"Facebook is like an entire web operating system," he said. ....

More at the link.

Facebook -- for everyone who loves small talk, looking at photo albums, idiotic conversation, doing the Jumble, and family newsletters. Having your personal data collected and living your life like a zoo animal behind glass is just a bonus.

That may be true for some people, but for me, I had no choice but to join. Organizing the care for my dying and far too shortly departed friend, I found that there was an entire Facebook page dedicated to her. The woman who set it up had been on the outs with my friend through her illness, but their circle, including friends going back almost 20 years, were consoling themselves through that page. Even though I'd avoided the service like the plague, I joined, at least in order to send out reminders of events or, like say, photos of the memorial for those who couldn't attend.

Once I was there I found that the entire visual art community of Seattle was using FB as a marketing tool. It was all over at that point, I couldn't not be on it. Critics, curators, and other writers, local and national are on it. Surprisingly, it's the one place you might actually get their attention with a comment.

Scroll up and take a look at one of the articles posted by AD. It presents a different take on the privacy issue and outlines what it calls the response factor. I don't often get responses on Facebook itself, but I do get them later when I see people in person. For a single person, that takes out some of the sting of isolation, I know that some people are paying attention. If you think of how humans evolved, the idea of privacy, at least concerning what would be known publicly if we lived in smaller populations, communities, or tribes, is a relatively new one.

I'll give another example of benefit, a number of people, including some long lost school friends whom I suspect may have been trafficking victims themselves but who would never seek out this venue, are now aware of the Franklin Scandal book.

As long as there is no other mass appeal tech in the offing to replace both the networking advantages and visibility payoffs Facebook provides, it will obtain, no matter how much it abuses its users. I am glad there are new services being developed.

I also learned for myself however, after about the third time of course, never friend a love interest, never. Well, unless you get engaged or something.

whoa, i just realized that you're a goon

[Simulist]

whoa, i just realized that you're a goon

Whoa. The last time "goon" was in popular use was in Gotham City in the 1960s. (And that was in a comic book.)

Project Willow is no goon. In fact, she's a respected member of this community.

Take notes.

[crikkett]

whoa, i just realized that you're a goon

Whoa, personal attacks. Shame on you.