On facebook, choices and public opinion
I read a post in this blog that spoke about privacy issues in facebook.
Take this in mind when adding apps, people... Your virtual life are no longer (if they ever were) yours to live; Information privacy is a slowly degenerating to non-existence issue.
I work technical support for an academic establishment. I see how much work our Data Security guys do to protect our users (usually with little to no gratitude from said users; In fact, much to the users dismay most of the times). And I wonder why is it that people so freely give up their privacy. The internet, whose vision of was once that of actual commerce and networking online, is quickly becoming more and more dangerous.
Wait a sec, I'm starting to sound like I'm all against this.
I am all in favour of freedom of information. As much as I am in favour of copyright law and believe it is fair for a person or company to profit from creating something others are willing to pay for, I am also aware that some freedom of mind should remain (for the wiki\google likers, I am not a capitalist but rather a libertarian of sorts).
People who tell me all music and MP3's on the internet should be free to own, and that if they want to hear a song they'd just download it on soulseek or emule without considering the consequences, I usually turn to read Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged; People who tell me how important it is to retain copyright values and patents (or microsoft employees in general) I usually refer to read Spider Robinson's Melancholy Elephants.
It is the golden path in between that is hard to maintain. Facebook is doing one thing very well and one thing very poorly; Connecting people worldwide in an ever-expanding knowledge and interest web is a good thing. This is the vision the net was born of; The ever expansion of the human community to encompass the globe. I've known people to have a friend list of 1000 friends, and I've known people to use facebook as "just another email"; But the fact they have a facebook account speaks volumes as to the ability of this interface to capture hearts and minds of world wide users.
However, the thing facebook does poorly is evident in this post - to stay true to the spirit of the cause I defined earlier, at least some protection (or at the very least, information about the dangers) to users must be supplied. Allowing people to blissfully and ignorantly keep sending out every private information that they believe is being held in confidence is downright wrong. If facebook chooses to maintain their privacy policy as is, that is within their rights; But not telling users anything about this simply isn't. This is what Microsoft has been doing for a while now; It has paid off in volumes, but morally speaking Microsoft is still thought of as the evil giant of the computer industry, and in this writer's opinion it's only a matter of time before some reasonable competition will arrive.
Facebook will do what they want, eventually. So will Microsoft; And I don't expect to see any legislature action in this department. The real question would be what will we, as users of these systems, will do; What will we and what will we not tolerate; And how long will it take for people to understand that there is an alternative to being used as cattle, if one simply start choosing according to information and thought, and not according to peer presure and the effect of the herd.
Take this in mind when adding apps, people... Your virtual life are no longer (if they ever were) yours to live; Information privacy is a slowly degenerating to non-existence issue.
I work technical support for an academic establishment. I see how much work our Data Security guys do to protect our users (usually with little to no gratitude from said users; In fact, much to the users dismay most of the times). And I wonder why is it that people so freely give up their privacy. The internet, whose vision of was once that of actual commerce and networking online, is quickly becoming more and more dangerous.
Wait a sec, I'm starting to sound like I'm all against this.
I am all in favour of freedom of information. As much as I am in favour of copyright law and believe it is fair for a person or company to profit from creating something others are willing to pay for, I am also aware that some freedom of mind should remain (for the wiki\google likers, I am not a capitalist but rather a libertarian of sorts).
People who tell me all music and MP3's on the internet should be free to own, and that if they want to hear a song they'd just download it on soulseek or emule without considering the consequences, I usually turn to read Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged; People who tell me how important it is to retain copyright values and patents (or microsoft employees in general) I usually refer to read Spider Robinson's Melancholy Elephants.
It is the golden path in between that is hard to maintain. Facebook is doing one thing very well and one thing very poorly; Connecting people worldwide in an ever-expanding knowledge and interest web is a good thing. This is the vision the net was born of; The ever expansion of the human community to encompass the globe. I've known people to have a friend list of 1000 friends, and I've known people to use facebook as "just another email"; But the fact they have a facebook account speaks volumes as to the ability of this interface to capture hearts and minds of world wide users.
However, the thing facebook does poorly is evident in this post - to stay true to the spirit of the cause I defined earlier, at least some protection (or at the very least, information about the dangers) to users must be supplied. Allowing people to blissfully and ignorantly keep sending out every private information that they believe is being held in confidence is downright wrong. If facebook chooses to maintain their privacy policy as is, that is within their rights; But not telling users anything about this simply isn't. This is what Microsoft has been doing for a while now; It has paid off in volumes, but morally speaking Microsoft is still thought of as the evil giant of the computer industry, and in this writer's opinion it's only a matter of time before some reasonable competition will arrive.
Facebook will do what they want, eventually. So will Microsoft; And I don't expect to see any legislature action in this department. The real question would be what will we, as users of these systems, will do; What will we and what will we not tolerate; And how long will it take for people to understand that there is an alternative to being used as cattle, if one simply start choosing according to information and thought, and not according to peer presure and the effect of the herd.