[lbo-talk] your Facebook is their fortune

Bill Bartlett billbartlett at aapt.net.au
Mon Feb 2 21:51:40 PST 2009


My son and his wife visited here a few days over Xmas. (They live in Q'land). Both work for the same employer up there, but my son couldn't get any time off, so he had to take a couple of days off sick to make it work. A day after they got here he noticed that his wife had uploaded some holiday photos onto facebook (or one of those site, they all sound the same to me.)

He was furious, he had to explain to her that it wasn't a good look for her to casually tell the world, including all her "friends", including work-mates and supervisors, that she was on holiday in Tasmania. Given that everyone knows that her husband comes from Tasmania, it wouldn't be rocket science to work out that he was down here with her. While officially off sick. ;-)

So I see the point. What I don't see is why anyone bothers with these sites? I see my inbook contains another invitation to join a "group" on facebook:

"... invited you to join the group "Samboy is back!!!" it tells me.

I have no idea who or what Samboy is. (A brand of potato crIsps, but they never left so they can't be "back".

So I just ignore them these days, these groups don't seem to actually do anything or mean anything. There's no point to facebook at all. I haven't logged in for months, in fact I've forgotten how to log in now, my long-term memory has filtered the information out.

Here's another one:

... invited you to join the Facebook group "MAURICIO FUNES PRESIDENTE 2009"

What's THAT all about? I must admit that some of the names are somewhat intriguing, I'm tempted to try to work out how to go about getting in again. Then I remember that was how I got sucked in the first time, but there was nothing there in the final analysis. I advertised some Golden pheasants for sale, but heard nothing. So obviously there's not a lot of commercial potential!

So the problem is easy to solve. Just stop it. Read a book or something, start a garden. If you can't do that, then just be moderately discreet. I guess the problem is that the sort of people who are bored enough to use facebook and the like don't have the smarts to exercise sensible discretion. In which case, there's no hope for them. If wasn't facebook which gave them away, it would be something else.

Bill Bartlett Bracknell tas

At 10:31 PM -0500 2/2/09, WD wrote:


>On Mon, Feb 2, 2009 at 6:03 PM, Bill Bartlett
><billbartlett at aapt.net.au> wrote:
>
>> I guess that the less people have any actual privacy, the more they like to
>> cling to petty token bits of privacy that are afforded to them. Or rebel
>> against innocuous things like Facebook, because they can't resist the real
> > intrusions, like employers taking blood and DNA samples, corporations
>> swapping their credit profile and governments tapping their phone and
>> reading their mail.
>
>
>To the extent the data on Facebook is only mined by marketers, I'll
>second the comments from Bill, Doug, et al. But what prevents
>Facebook from selling its data to companies who might then make it
>available to employers or insurance companies? Surely someone could
>come up with a way to use Facebook data to identify people who might
>be union sympathizers, heavy drinkers or whatever. If there's a
>decent slippery slope argument in this case, then people are right to
>be concerned about who Facebook sells its data to.
>
>What is more interesting (and frightening) to me, though, is that
>Facebook can/will bring the personal and the professional realms of
>one's life together -- and for many people, that's a bad thing.
>Whereas Facebook used to be a popular website where people could
>comment on photos of their friends doing Jello shots, now it's an
>all-purpose networking tool. If you're not discriminating about who
>your Facebook friends are -- and many people aren't, and sometimes you
>just _have_ to approve people -- then news from your personal life can
>travel very quickly into your professional life.
>
>A friend of mine who has applied to graduate school but hasn't told
>his employer got spooked the other week when a friend of his posted an
>innocuous message on his Facebook page asking how his applications
>were going. Another friend just had a prospective client who wanted
>to become her friend, which creates problems no matter what she does.
>My wife and I are hiding her pregnancy from my dad's side of the
>family right now because half of them are on Facebook and she doesn't
>want the people she works with to know. What about someone who gets a
>bad biopsy and s/he wants to keep it hidden from work as long as
>possible? And so on... Blah blah, no one is making you join, blah
>blah privacy options -- fine, but that doesn't mean Facebook doesn't
>have the potential to create serious problems. Today's concerns about
>"privacy" on Facebook might be misplaced, but that's better than
>nothing, IMO.
>
>-WD
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