A follow-up from my Facebook quick hit the other day. MSNBC.com’s Internet blogger, Bob Sullivan, covers the Facebook furore, and links to tips for maintaining some degree of privacy (and the harrowingly entertaining struggle of one man trying to leave Facebook forever). The money quote for civil libertarians and the downright paranoid:
And of course, with some data, there’s just no way to remove it:
“Where you make use of the communication features of the service to share information with other individuals on Facebook, however, (e.g., sending a personal message to another Facebook user) you generally cannot remove such communications,” the Facebook terms of service agreement reads.
This should give pause to any Facebook user who plans to get a job or have children some day. Heaven forbid you decide to run for Congress 20 years from now. And we haven’t even mentioned Facebook’s Beacon disaster, which saw the company introduce an advertising platform that followed users around the Web and reported their behavior to friends. Facebook quickly backtracked after a similar uproar.
Really worth reading the article in full.
If you didn’t catch the NYT debate, I think Maciej Ceglowski has the best of it when he argues:
In real life, ephemeral conversations are not a luxury — they are part of what it means to be human. We weren’t built to remember everything that has ever happened in our lives — every movie night, bake sale or gossip session — nor would we want to. But online, it’s as if everyone is wired for sound, and every potted plant is hiding a camera. Our expectations as social beings don’t match the autistic reality of our computer systems.
