Give Up the Fight For Personal Privacy? 751
KlaymenDK writes "Over the last decade or so, I have strived to maintain my privacy. I have uninstalled Windows, told my friends 'sorry' when they wanted me to join Facebook, had a fight with my brother when he wanted to move the family email hosting to Gmail, and generally held back on my personal information online. But since, amongst all of my friends, I am the only one doing this, it may well be that my battle is lost already. Worse, I'm really putting myself out of the loop, and it is starting to look like self-flagellation. Indeed, it is a common occurrence that my wife or friends will strike up a conversation based on something from their Facebook 'wall' (whatever that is). Becoming ever more unconnected with my friends, live or online, is ultimately harming my social relations. I am seriously considering throwing in the towel and signing up for Gmail, Facebook, the lot. If 'they' have my soul already, I might as well reap the benefits of this newfangled, privacy-less, AJAX-2.0 world. It doesn't really matter if it was me or my friends selling me out. Or does it? I'd love to hear your thoughts on the matter. How many Windows-eschewing users are not also eschewing the social networking services and all the other 2.0 supersites with their dubious end-user license agreements?"
You might have to join them just to control them. (Score:5, Informative)
I basically made a facebook account so I could remove tags.
I have no applications installed. Installing ONE removes your opt-out.
Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Your privacy was eroded for you (Score:5, Informative)
So despite my efforts to keep my image & life details to myself, this has been undermined many times over by Facebook fanatics who have tagged pictures of me, and have added "helpful" details about how the picture was taken at my wife's cousin's wedding, complete with dates & locations.
I agree, the helpful details etc are annoying as anything. You can, however, UNTAG yourself from photos! If you care about privacy (as you clearly do, and I do as well), I would highly recommend untagging yourself.
Re:Your privacy was eroded for you (Score:5, Informative)
You can control tags of you in your Facebook privacy settings.
Re:Stick to your guns (Score:3, Informative)
I don't know about facebook but MySpace has decent privacy options and controls on who sees what of yours. I don't have a facebook page but I do have a MySpace page and everybody has one or the other if not both. My MySpace is set up thusly:
- My profile and my pictures are set so that only my friends may view them
- I don't have any incriminating pictures or words on my page anyway
- I use some of these [slashdot.org] codes to hide my friends list from everybody(including my friends) to prevent gossip. Comments may also be hidden. If you can't figure out how to do that then you shouldn't be here!
Use a browser with privacy options and plugins and set it to not remember anything except cookies and to delete everything everytime it closes. Don't click on the ducks or the monkeys. Don't run e-mail attachments. Use a hardware firewall: iptables works very well. Never use your real information when filling out ANYTHING except for financial or employment purposes.
Re:Your privacy was eroded for you (Score:5, Informative)
I too have declined to open one, privacy reasons being one of the many reasons, but, I don't find that it has hurt me any.
For one thing...I found that it is not only old people in Korea that use email, I keep in touch with all my friends via email. And not just jokes...we have real conversations,a nd often interesting threads with groups of us on things like political debate. We just don't broadcast it publicly and render it searchable forever.
Also, believe it or not....the phone still is a great way to communicate when you can't be there in person.
I warn people when I can to tell them NOT to put too much out there publicly....some that haven't listened...have already been bitten in the ass by it...and learn their lesson the hard way.
And I gotta say....with the economy getting in bad shape...jobs are gonna get a bit harder to get. And with it already known that many employers NOW search the internet for background on you, putting pics of you out there sucking the skull bong are NOT going to help you any at all.
Bitch about it not being fair to not get a job based on what you do on your own time, or back when you were younger, but, that is how it is today.
On the other hand...maybe I should encourage more people to put stupid shit information like that about themselves on the internet, that will just take them out of competition with me for a good job.
Re:Err.. (Score:5, Informative)
Facebook made it impossible for you to delete your account - until there was a public outcry.
"developers" of "applications" can see a great deal of your private data - this has not been fixed - there has not been a public outcry yet.
If it was private data and how much I choose to let others on the web see then that would be one thing. The issue I see with facebook is that they themselves seem to want to exploit your data at every single stage. Things like the inability to delete your account and "opt-out" services should be the anathema of any business that cares about privacy - instead they nefariously implemented them without consent and defended them until there was outcry. It took a feature piece in the New York Times before they decided to let people delete their accounts. What are they trying to hide?
Re:"I'm not doing anything illegal" (Score:3, Informative)
You are making the assumption that nothing will happen in the future to make currently acceptable, moral, lawful behavior illegal.
Indeed, there's at least one scientist who admitted to experimental drug use when (and where) it wasn't illegal being barred from entry to the United States today for that reason. He was found because a TSA screener googled him and found the book he wrote with a chapter on the subject.
(And I'm glad to see my old signature (about eternal copyright) lives on. I need a better new one than the one I have now (TANSTAFFL).)
Re:What about Windows? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Your privacy was eroded for you (Score:3, Informative)
I agree, the helpful details etc are annoying as anything. You can, however, UNTAG yourself from photos! If you care about privacy (as you clearly do, and I do as well), I would highly recommend untagging yourself.
So, let me get this straight, I have to sign up to facebook in order to protect my privacy? Surely I'm not the only one that sees anything fucking wrong with that? If I'm not on facebook I shouldn't have to sign up to keep myself off.
What's next?
Will you have to put yourself on the no-fly list in order to find out if you are allowed to fly?
Or perhaps you'll agree to provide SIN, drivers license, photos, address, and fingerprints to use anonymizing services like tor?
Lets just be done with it and have a barcode tatooed on your forehead to enable you to purchase or sell goods...
Re:Your privacy was eroded for you (Score:5, Informative)
Exactly. Those that think they MUST have a facebook and myspace are nuts. I keep in contact with my friends by going to be with them. you know leaving you home and interacting outside the home.
My friend in high school that moved to kenya and I havent seen in 12 years? screw him if he cant email me or write me. I will not waste my time to go read his, their ,your facebook wall and shuffle through all the inane nonsense. The ones I know best have a blog that is modern enough to have an RSS feed so I can get updates automagically.
Facebook and myspace and other sites are utter crap as they require you to go and waste hours there digging through the crap. Decent things will allow you to gather and sort automatically so I can get the friends and family overview in 5 minutes every day.
And no, I ignore requests by friend s to subscribe to their twitter. I dont want to know that you just went poop.
Re:Your privacy was eroded for you (Score:4, Informative)
Wait just a minute. A public blog? Without me having signed a model release for that image? Sorry to rain on your parade, but while they may own the image, they can't just go publish an 'identifiable photo' of me without my consent.
The right of publicity only applies to commercial exploitation.
Re:Or you could just take legal action (Score:4, Informative)
Are we talking about television or, for example personal flickr pages here?? I fail to see why if I take a photograph when I'm on vacation I should be obligated to post-process my images that I take in public to remove any mechanism of identifying the people who might have been on vacation in the same place.
Unfortunately, Facebook is kind of an analog to photography in the real world -- you can be incidentally photographed and not be intruded upon. Or, you have linked yourself in with a bunch of friends and one of them photographed you doing stupid and your mom/wife/whatever might see it -- only in the digital world, more people than you expected could see it.
I'm not arguing for a blanket right to directly photograph people without their consent and use those images for commercial purposes -- but if you're just simply 'background' to my photo, I'm not going to edit out your face or license plate, because it's going to make my carefully composed photo look like shit. I bought that camera because it takes nice pictures, not so I can edit out big chunks of it to hide everyone.
No, you mistake me. This isn't about me, per se. But it's not about you either.
I'm specifically defending the equivalent of me posting my vacation pics (or birthday pics) on flickr (or, Facebook) without editing your face or license plate out of my picture. If you were at Judy's Birthday Party, and that was a particularly crazy night, Facebook is not violating your privacy because Judy decided to post pictures of you mooning the boss. I just don't think you can expect that kind of granularity in laws and expect it to work. You'd have to outlaw cameras -- and everybody's phone has a &*^%^& camera.
This isn't about selfish American culture, and, for the record, I'm not an American.
Allowing yourself to be photographed in compromising situations doesn't mean that the people who were also there must have a "gag order" placed upon them for how they use their own photographs. If your friends photographed you "hitting that skull bong" and posted it on the internet, you beef is with them, not Facebook.
Cheers
Re:Or you could just take legal action (Score:4, Informative)
What I find the most ironic, is that in the earlyish days of the web (and before that, USENET), I was an active participant in online communities. For that, I would often be labeled as an anti-social dork. But today, I'm labeled an anti-social dork because I don't participate in most online communities. Sigh.
I don't go back quite as far as Usenet, but apart from that I can identify very well.
For me the matter is more that if you look at my meatspace friends and my cyberfriends, there is no overlap (in fact they are very far apart) -- and this is exactly because technical forums do "it" right, and social forums don't.
Thus, I "can't" and don't talk to my social friends online, other than by email -- which by now is as old-school as Usenet itself, and no longer "a supported feature" of most of my meatspace friends who have moved on to texting and "facebook walling" or whatchammacallit.
Re:Or you could just take legal action (Score:3, Informative)
Yes, Libel has to be "false and damaging".
If you were actually humping that sheep in the middle of main street, you're SOL, because at that point, it's simply a matter of reporting fact.
The truth, oddly enough, isn't libel. It may be inconvenient, but that's not the same thing. I actually do know what the law says in regard to photography in public spaces, and what I can do with it.
If your friends post a picture of you on facebook doing something you wish you hadn't, that's not libel. That just means you should have been more careful.