"The Facebook Resisters" from NY Times

[The Gorn]

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/14/technology/shunning-facebook-and-living-to-tell-about-it.html?src=me&ref=general

Some clips:

One of Facebook’s main selling points is that it builds closer ties among friends and colleagues. But some who steer clear of the site say it can have the opposite effect of making them feel more, not less, alienated.

“I wasn’t calling my friends anymore,” said Ashleigh Elser, 24, who is in graduate school in Charlottesville, Va. “I was just seeing their pictures and updates and felt like that was really connecting to them.”

Many of the holdouts mention concerns about privacy. Those who study social networking say this issue boils down to trust. Amanda Lenhart, who directs research on teenagers, children and families at the Pew Internet and American Life Project, said that people who use Facebook tend to have “a general sense of trust in others and trust in institutions.” She added: “Some people make the decision not to use it because they are afraid of what might happen.”

The part I bolded in the last clip is really interesting. "Facebook fan" behavior, such as recommending Facebook for virtually every social need, does seem to be highly correlated with gullibility (as I have repeated ad nauseum in my critiques of inbound marketing theorycraft.)

I have concern, not fear, with how Facebook data might be used in the future. Not only the personal info hacking aspect but the aspect of inferring your social relationships. Could the latter information have political use in the future? Regardless, my list of FB friends would be truly banal and uninteresting to any government person.

If I did have relationships with individuals that were subversively political in nature FB is the last place I would make that contact or "friend" them.

I'm on Facebook as a way to stay in minimal contact with family members whom I would otherwise not stay in contact with.  I have kept it because it seems to be emerging as a primary way to post to online news comment sites. If I did not have one particular family member on Facebook I would probably not have created the account when I did.

It's completely arm's length stuff, as in, here's some pictures of what we did over here last week, but we absolutely cannot and will not make time for an actual visit, or a phone call, because then you're disrupting our lives and taking up too much time.

Like cooking, easy/quick means mediocre.

I'm looking forward to and hoping for some future meltdown of Facebook use, due to general public alarm about privacy or personal information being hacked. I think it would bring users back down to earth.

[Carrie Cobol]

I think the social networking aspect is valuable, but the way Facebook is trying to push it to data warehousing/marketing uses is very, very bad.  It's essentially being pulled between two primary markets:

1.  social connection data crunching for targetted advertising
2.  innane chitchat and photo/news sharing of the people who log into it

At some point Facebook is going to have to choose which "customer" is more important and stop riding the fence.  The way it works right now is not very good for either; trying to be all things to all people so to speak.

[benali72]

Businesses and governments are finding all sorts of great uses for that Facebook data people naively post.

For example, see the article "As Banks Start Nosing Around Facebook and Twitter, the Wrong Friends Just Might Sink Your Credit."  --

http://www.betabeat.com/2011/12/13/as-banks-start-nosing-around-facebook-and-twitter-the-wrong-friends-might-just-sink-your-credit/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=twitter&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+hackernewsyc+%28Hacker+News+YC%29

And of course, now Klout is scoring "your influence" via its secret proprietary algorithsm and selling the info to potential employers and other organizations. Vaughan-Nichols tells how it influenced whether he could get business deals in his article entitled "Klout Craziness" --

http://www.zdnet.com/blog/networking/klout-craziness/1688

Most FB posters have no idea of how their data can and will be used against them.

My favorite quote from the NYT article -- "People may start to ask the question that, if you aren’t on social channels, why not? Are you hiding something?” she said."

You're not dumb enough to post personal data on FB, therefore you must be hiding something!  Is that pitiful or what?

[The Gorn]

It's interesting how something so comparatively old is "new" again. I mean social networking via computers.

20 years ago I participated on Compuserve forums and later on Usenet and on various BBSs. Back then I learned the downsides of sending rash emails, posting whatever came into my head publicly, and exposing relatively private facts about myself to strangers.

Today, average people have no idea about the roots of online networking. They think "Rain Man" Zuckerberg invented it all.

I know what the risks are. I have the experience that all of the social networking mavens lack because they're too freaking young.

All of these breathlessly young idiots posting their brain waves (essentially) don't realize the permanent record that they are constructing. In older tech terms, it's like your private diary being posted to the newspaper.

You look at most people's Facebook postings and they are essentially a spew. Stuff that I may choose to only share with a few friends.

Stuff as private as what most people post doesn't really belong in the public record. And that's not even counting the "social graphs" that can be constructed.

Actually, there is a very bright spot here indeed for all of us who are old enough to have the brains to understand that social networking wasn't invented yesterday, who may have past histories online:

I used to worry that what I posted on Realrates, Usenet, or on some other discussion boards could come back to haunt me.

Possibly. But Facebook and other portal's services create so much data that all of us who use the "old school" technologies of online fora are essentially under the radar.

Think about it. The standard assumption in the near future will  be "all candidates for jobs must have their social network presence vetted."

But there won't even be recognition of the vast underbelly of the internet... that is, everything that is not Facebook. Because users of non Facebook tech will not be that common.

Anything I post to FB is by definition innocuous pablum. If I want to talk about something really controversial, I use a moniker and I go to the private section. If I want to post something merely deleterious to business culture at large, I post it on this board. I'd never post that stuff to Facebook, which is a gold fish bowl for commoners.

Being on a board like this is like using strings and tin cans for phones in an environment where the cops are wiretapping all citizens. Your compromising info goes under the radar.

This works to my advantage. Screw people stupid enough to become easy targets.  We who are wiser can easily hide behind the data clutter that the mass public produces.

[benali72]

And now, Facebook offer single click access to everything you've ever posted... a new feature they call Timeline --

https://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/16/technology/facebook-brings-back-the-past-with-new-design.html?src=me&ref=technology

"Timeline makes a user’s entire history of photos, links and other things shared on Facebook accessible with a single click."

"This may be the first moment that many of Facebook’s 800 million members realize just how many digital bread crumbs they have been leaving on the site — and on the Web in general."

[The Gorn]

Maybe this will wake up FB users.

I see it as an unimportant development. I fully expect that Facebook will someday, somehow, lease access to everything that anyone has ever posted or messaged on FB to anyone who has the "credentials" to demand it: police, courts, and of course, employers.

Facebook is a data warehouse. Stupid end users don't understand this.

[datagirl]

I made a potential client contact through a chance casual meeting at an unrelated venue (real life social networking  ).  One of the first things out of the guys mouth wasn't did I have a business card or did I have a website.  It was "are you on Facebook." Umm, no. 

[Walter Mitty]

I read a book years ago called Shockwave Rider.  It was fiction, inspired by the book Future Shock.  The genre was sort a fusion of sci-fi and social dystopia. 

A lot of what was in that book presages what we are seeing today to a fairly close degree.

I keep mentioning these presages:  "Community Memory" and "As We May Think".  one presages compuserve and Facebook.  The other presages the world wide web.  My point is that the stuff that's new isn't that new.

[ilconsiglliere]

I think this stuff is dangerous on many levels. I am not on it and refuse to use it. Companies have enough data on people already via purchasing habits. There is no reason for me to "like" things and let them build up data on whom my friends are. This is a primary reason I took down my profile on LinkedIn.

Even though you can set your stuff to private, what does that mean? Private to who - Casual users? your friends? the govmt/military/police? companies? Who exactly can over ride your privacy settings nor who they are giving it too. You have no idea what they are doing with all this data.

Frankly I dont buy into it at all. Its a glorified bulletin board where people can post pictures and status. Big deal, message boards have been around on the Net since Usenet days. Its not new. They make it sound like "social media" is actually an industry that produces something. If you really think about it - their product is not Facebook itself but the data that Facebook contains. That is their product and frankly you are giving them YOU for free.

If you really think about it and this is the paranoia in me speaking, Facebook is a voluntary surveillance mechanism. When I worked at B*ll Labs they would put hypothetical scenarios in front of us at times and ask how we would solve "interesting" problems.

For example - take this scenario: you want to conduct wide spread surveillance on the general population. How do you do it?

Traditionally keeping an eye on people involves having someone watch them - literally. But you dont have the resources to do that so how do you do it? You get people to VOLUNTARILY tell you what they are doing, who they are doing it with, what they like, where they are going and when they are doing it under the guise of being "fun", "social" and "keeping in touch with your friends".

Sounds like paranoia, right? Well what if it isnt.

I was exposed to incredibly large databases of data when I worked at Ma B*ll. You guys ever heard of Daytona? I worked on a platform that used a piece of it years ago. Its one of the largest databases in the world with 312TB of "stuff". When I worked on it they had phone records of the population going back 20+ years. You start to wonder what exactly are doing with this data.

Go here to read about it: http://www2.research.att.com/~daytona/

Just food for thought and of course I am just being "social" .

[TRexx]

I made a potential client contact through a chance casual meeting at an unrelated venue (real life social networking  ).  One of the first things out of the guys mouth wasn't did I have a business card or did I have a website.  It was "are you on Facebook." Umm, no.

Whether we like it or not, if folks go to Facebook to find someone/something they want to hire/buy, we better be there or we won't be making any sales.

A few years ago you had to have a web page and before that you had to be in the Yellow Pages. I guess before that we hung up a shingle with our name on it.   

What bothers me is that I don't have to be in the Yellow Pages or have a web page or hang a shingle to look for a plumber.  But AFAIK in order to look at someone's FB page I have to sign on to FB. Is that correct?

[The Gorn]

Whether we like it or not, if folks go to Facebook to find someone/something they want to hire/buy, we better be there or we won't be making any sales.

A few years ago you had to have a web page and before that you had to be in the Yellow Pages. I guess before that we hung up a shingle with our name on it.   

I have both of those issues covered. If the individual is "old school" I have a standard web site with depth of content like real professionals and real businesses ought to.

If the individual wants to see my Facebook business page, filled with vanilla malarky and vapid postings, I have that. It is disinformation. "Yes, SIR, you may see my Facebook!"

If I were a prospective employer doing loyalty and subversion vetting to determine what Gorn was up to and whether he was a seditious and dangerous individual, I would find little or nothing.

What bothers me is that I don't have to be in the Yellow Pages or have a web page or hang a shingle to look for a plumber.  But AFAIK in order to look at someone's FB page I have to sign on to FB. Is that correct?

^ Try it, you'll see.

[TRexx]

^ Try it, you'll see.

OK I did. I went to facebook.com, found the "search for people" page, entered something in the search box and it said I needed to signon. 

[datagirl]

^ Try it, you'll see.

OK I did. I went to facebook.com, found the "search for people" page, entered something in the search box and it said I needed to signon.

If the person has their privacy settings for anyone to see their page and you have the URL to their wall or profile, you should see it just fine.  You can't "like", "poke", chat, pm, comment, etc. without signing on.  You can look at their information and wall comments of any of their "friends" with public settings.

http://www.facebook.com/pages/Queen-Elizabeth-II/110428482320169

http://www.facebook.com/BillGates?sk=wall

Generally you can google "facebook personsname" and come up with likely results.

-DG