May 28 2010

Friday, May 28, 2010

May 28 2010

Thought of the Day

The interwebs are buzzing about Facebook: May 31 is Quit Facebook Day, apparently.

A few thoughts:

Being On Facebook:
If you spend more time on Facebook than you do in front of the TV, kudos. You have more of a social life than the couch-potato generation. I like to see social web-works grow and TV shows get the boot. People talking to people is awesome.

Facebook Privacy:
If you think Facebook has privacy issues, maybe it's you. You choose what you post on Facebook. If it's private, keep it to an email. If it's okay to be public, list it. Just because Facebook asks you to fill out a field does not mean you have to type something into it.

If you are worried about Applications sharing your information, don't use the applications. How many people have the Snowball Fight app still? It's the middle of May, and Snowball Fight is using your information for whatever it wants, because you said it could. Weigh fun against privacy, please.

If you insist on listing things and using applications, learn to adjust your privacy settings. Who cares what the default is? I don't even know any more. Every time I log in I check the privacy settings to make sure it is doing what I want it to be doing. If you're a parent of a minor, do it for your kids.

Photographs and Privacy:
Speaking of parents of minors, why post pictures of your children on Facebook? (or MySpace, or anywhere?) Every picture of my children I have is locked up for limited visibility, or of the back of their heads. Don't jeopardize your children's future privacy for your own fun and entertainment. If a friend of mine posts a picture of my kids, I make sure I'm not tagged on the photo, so that no one can see that monster belongs to me anyway.

Most people don't look at pictures of your kids, anyway. Or of your drunk nights out. People look at what their interested in: If they haven't seen you in ages, they want to see how wealthy you are, what's your car? your house? the interior of your house? your job? Sometimes people respond to shock value, like "That's a BIG dog!" or "You let your kids do WHAT?" They also like to reminisce, "That picture was 20 years ago! I can't believe you still have that!" (which I'm not sure why that is so unbelievable. People are pack rats.)
The Internet and Privacy:
When was the last time you did a websearch for yourself? What information about you is available from other sources? Did you set up a Yahoo! profile page some time ago and have forgotten? Did you know that anybody can look at county records of your house? How about online newspapers: have you ever been quoted, have a marriage, birth, or death listing for you or your family? Had a picture printed? All that is available online, too. And in libraries. Ever have a landline? Most landline numbers and their owners from the past 10 years or so can be found online.

And all of that is for free. If I really wanted to, I could find out much, much more about you by dropping a bit of cash.

And that's only just the start of a search. If someone were after your children, they could use county records of where you live to determine where your child goes to school, and then the school website to find out when school is in session. They could even find out what the names of the teachers your children have, having found their birth announcements in the newspaper online and knowing their likely age and grade.

Are you afraid?
Are you afraid of what people can find out about you from your Facebook page? I've determined a girlfriend of a friend had still been talking to her ex fiance. I've determined where's she'd likely to be on a Thursday night between 6 and 10. I knew what income bracket her family was in, her graduation year, the school she was attending and a narrow field of likely classes she'd be in. And that was before I ever met her. How? Because she didn't take control of her own information. She let it all hang out.

Are you afraid of what people can find out about you from the Internet? I've found a friend I haven't seen in 12 years, know when he got married, that his wife won the raffle at a church, and that he works somewhere that gave him an employer-based email account. I know where he lives, what his phone number is, his wife's name, and his email address. He has no internet presence, no social networking. It wouldn't be his thing.

I don't hack, I just search savvy. The internet makes the world a small, small place, and all your friends a little creepier.

Some Links:
Get your Facebook Privacy Back: ReclaimPrivacy.org
The Mesa County Assessor's Office webpage: Online search for properties and their owners
Simple place to type your name and see what comes up: Search
Mesa County School District: Listings of all the schools, hours of operation, and links to teacher pages
Mesa State College Student Directory: Search
Simple phone book search: SuperPages