Facebook plunges the Earth into the Sun. To change this option, go to Settings–>Planetary Settings–>Trajectory and un-check ‘Apocalypse’

What I’ve just done, of course, is I’ve taken a “private” message that was intended for my friend’s friends only and, without asking my friend’s permission, posted it on another website.

This is precisely why the Facebook privacy settings are essentially for the birds.

I may, one day. But because I’ve “shared” so little, there is not much reason right now. Right now, I use it to watch passively what my friends share–mostly, the good articles, videos, quotes, thoughts and so forth. Not so much the intimate photos and stuff.

There is a certain sunk cost attached to the effort that went into creating a “social graph”.

That said, I doubt I’ll be on FB in a year.

Re the goalposts: They are shifting them, and I knew they would ever since I talked to mark two years ago. So I’ve never been surprised by it.

Since you are clued up on the hassle involved, the constant loopholes and tricks into sharing increasing amounts of information, I wonder;

What’s stopping you from closing you account?

My question isn’t meant to be facetious, I’m interested because you have many of the same issues as I did, which led to me leaving FB.

Also, do you feel that FB are trying to slowly move the privacy goalposts so that people don’t notice? It kind of reminds me of the way governments survey us more and more, and people dont really notice.

ALTHOUGH, that is a completely new can of worms!

Congrats on starting a v. interesting discussion.

Luckily, early broadband (Aeolus, God of the Winds) blew up a stormy 3G connection in time for those in its belly to connect to headquarters.

i have a very small internet footprint. yet even after unsubscribing to a FB group, my post has been cached by google. good thing i normally don’t have foot-in-mouth

I’ll be honest, I absolutely HATE Facebook and I would like nothing more than to be able to get rid of it for good. But the simple fact is, I can’t. I deactivated my account once, but the backlash from my friends was so intense that I had to fire my profile up again just a couple of days later.

I got emails from ‘friends’ (who before Facebook would have been nothing more than casual acquaintances) asking why I had “removed them from my life” and if I still considered them as friends. I’m at university and Facebook is used for organising absolutely everything – from parties and football matches to study groups and shift-covering at work. It’s literally impossible to stay up to date with everything that’s going on these days unless you have a Facebook profile.

I’ve found a bit of a compromise by deleting pretty much every piece of personal information from my profile. When your profile is bare, Facebook seems to malfunction and go completely insane. It won’t accept the fact that I don’t want a profile picture, and keeps popping up telling me I should really think about uploading one. When I try to hide this screen, the ‘close’ doesn’t actually remove it – it just takes you to the privacy settings, almost as if it’s encouraging you to ‘publicise’ more information. It’s a bit odd.

Anyway, great blog and let’s hope 2010 sees the decline of social networking. I want my real friends back!

so i quit. and later started a blog. i enjoy writing more than “adding friends” anyway, and i feel like i’m actually challenging myself to accomplish something while online. however, there were some posts i’d made while on facebook that i wish i could get back — i don’t have duplicate copies of them anywhere. anyone know if that’s possible?

You’re almost certainly not very vulnerable at all, because it sounds as though you “practice Platonic sharing” as I do.

That said, three comments:

1) If you’re not careful, your info may now (or soon) be visible not only to your friends but also to “friends of friends” (an exponentially bigger group, which may include people better described as enemies) or even “everyone”, this default option that we’re railing about here. So go and check.

2) Speaking purely for those people in my own “social graph” (ie, friend list) who share extremely intimate stuff (relationships, health, sex, etc), I believe there are risks involved. Relationships veer off course, health deteriorates, sex evokes jealousy and vendettas in others, etc. You’re not in that group, so don’t worry.

3) I also think you should not give any info that, in combination with your social-security number or other data (which can easily be gleaned elsewhere nowadays) renders you vulnerable to weirdos. That includes: birthdays, mother’s maiden name (ie, what if your mom is a friend?), first job, place of birth etc. If you think about it, that’s what your bank would ask you to identify you if you called.

I’m not very clued in about this privacy business on FB. I have a few personal details on my profile like my dob and my photos etc. How am I vulnerable if I am sharing some info that my friends already know about me? Please can someone explain?

Thanks

I’ve seen young girls have a FB with their whole lives, where they work, and their lives mapped out and available for every stalker and wierdo out there. I think there needs to be healthy boundaries when it comes to an online presence.

And of course nobody really “needs” to know whether we were drunk last night. But by that reasoning, few people ever really “need” to know anything about us. If everybody were to keep all non-essential information to themselves, this would be a rather silent planet.

plagiarism is: a piece of writing that has been copied from someone else and is presented as being your own work (wordnetweb.princeton.edu/perl/webwn)

FB has no way to report this unless the member has stolen your work. it is very rampant. i saw a FB member with 2500 + friends and nearly every post was plagiarized.

plagiarism is a bit off topic but it is also an invasion of privacy. i find it interesting that the mediator of this blog a writer himself has not responded to the question?

because, you know, this was just a blog post. Impressionistic. Goes with the genre.

These articles have been written, I might add.

So there is nothing to criticize WordPress for at all, because it has never promised us privacy, and privacy is not what we came here for.

Facebook is the inverse.

Menelaus saw it on his Live Feed, because Helen had not updated her privacy settings, and a thousand ships were launched.

And aside from that, Achilles and Patroclus really should have kept their wall-to-walls private, don’t you think?

Does your blow-up doll have a phone number?

Today’s fist bump for poetic precision: “Great storytelling distills these many privacies into fiction from which we seek the truth”

OH, a simple people search can connect you to family maiden name and all…

Dafna’s right though, that is a bit off topic, but it’s still an interesting question.

http://thompson.blog.avg.com/2009/12/now-_this_-is-scary.html#axzz0Zdt0T9RO

i think i posted the link to which you refer, and i believe it was an actual recount not anecdotal.

“right wing, left wing chicken wing” makes no difference to me – woody guthrie

ultimately this blog is about privacy/ no privacy sharing etc. on FB. however everyone writes, blogs comments from an egocentric point of view.

as a writer yourself, perhaps you can respond or start a new article about the rampant theft of IP on FB and the web in general. there has always been plagiarism but unregulated FB and the internet seems to have brought it to a whole new despicable level.