I’ve not been too pleased with Facebook lately. Every time they change their layout they make profiles more and more public. Recently they are forcing you to link all your interests and favorite things to pages. Kind of sucks. I am pretty uncomfortable with this so I just deleted all my interests and favorites. My profile is even less personalized now than the already bland ‘unable to be personalized’ default profile. Also, even though I deleted my interests, I still get ads relating to them. This really suggests that your data is never gone. Everything on Facebook can be accessed. Pretty scary. I guess we just have to be more careful about what we post. I sure will.
I agree that how the information is treated–basically owned by Facebook and public to anybody they want to distribute it to–is rather sketchy. I probably wouldn’t use Facebook if I wasn’t going to college so far from home and so far from where my high school friends go to college. However, at the end he sounds a bit like he’s a proponent of MySpace (he’s even bummed that he can’t personalize the colors on a Facebook profile) and mentions that he’ll be finding other providers of online social networks. What are the privacy policies of other social networks? I think the way in which this article was written put me off–taking the form of a rant, it seems strongly backed by emotion, perhaps more so than information. I think it is kind of creepy how widespread Facebook is becoming and how much information they can glean from you, but when the argument ends with “1. The Facebook application itself sucks,” I felt less likely to side with the author. Agreed, Farmville and Mafia Wars and pretty much every other application are pretty stupid, but he gets all nit-picky about how slow the feed loads and how if HE took the time to customize it, it could be better, but it’s just not worth the effort. Reading the comments below the article was interesting, with both propoents and opponents of Facebook. One stuck out to me that said with anything online that we give information, if someone chooses to give that information it is because the benefits outweigh the risks. I’m actually not sure if the benefits outweigh the risks with Facebook for me, but I’m not going to be deleting my account until I hear an argument that is less of a rant–one that perhaps examines both benefits and risks to let the reader decide if it’s time to leave Facebook.
Lynn- I had the same reaction to all of the changes in format…I also deleted all of my interests etc. because I was uncomfortable with them being linked to other pages, but still do have ads on the side of my page relating to them. I feel like all of the changes are making profiles more and more public, which in turn has caused me to be even more cautious about what I post. And while I have always had my settings set to private, I find myself double checking them much more often.
I’ve not been too pleased with Facebook lately. Every time they change their layout they make profiles more and more public. Recently they are forcing you to link all your interests and favorite things to pages. Kind of sucks. I am pretty uncomfortable with this so I just deleted all my interests and favorites. My profile is even less personalized now than the already bland ‘unable to be personalized’ default profile. Also, even though I deleted my interests, I still get ads relating to them. This really suggests that your data is never gone. Everything on Facebook can be accessed. Pretty scary. I guess we just have to be more careful about what we post. I sure will.
I agree that how the information is treated–basically owned by Facebook and public to anybody they want to distribute it to–is rather sketchy. I probably wouldn’t use Facebook if I wasn’t going to college so far from home and so far from where my high school friends go to college. However, at the end he sounds a bit like he’s a proponent of MySpace (he’s even bummed that he can’t personalize the colors on a Facebook profile) and mentions that he’ll be finding other providers of online social networks. What are the privacy policies of other social networks? I think the way in which this article was written put me off–taking the form of a rant, it seems strongly backed by emotion, perhaps more so than information. I think it is kind of creepy how widespread Facebook is becoming and how much information they can glean from you, but when the argument ends with “1. The Facebook application itself sucks,” I felt less likely to side with the author. Agreed, Farmville and Mafia Wars and pretty much every other application are pretty stupid, but he gets all nit-picky about how slow the feed loads and how if HE took the time to customize it, it could be better, but it’s just not worth the effort. Reading the comments below the article was interesting, with both propoents and opponents of Facebook. One stuck out to me that said with anything online that we give information, if someone chooses to give that information it is because the benefits outweigh the risks. I’m actually not sure if the benefits outweigh the risks with Facebook for me, but I’m not going to be deleting my account until I hear an argument that is less of a rant–one that perhaps examines both benefits and risks to let the reader decide if it’s time to leave Facebook.
Lynn- I had the same reaction to all of the changes in format…I also deleted all of my interests etc. because I was uncomfortable with them being linked to other pages, but still do have ads on the side of my page relating to them. I feel like all of the changes are making profiles more and more public, which in turn has caused me to be even more cautious about what I post. And while I have always had my settings set to private, I find myself double checking them much more often.