121–130 of 142 posts
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And me leaving Facebook solves that problem how? At least now I see when that kind of stuff happens.
It's a good point - leaving Facebook won't solve things like drunken pictures posted by your friends. It will, however, stop things like "Yooooo, did you hit that last night? Wasssuppp!" on your Wall that your family, colleagues and potential employers can see.
It's not just hackers and Internet professionals who are worried by this. So I reckon it's up to all of us to create an easy-to-use, secure, friendly web-based framework for us to share and collaborate with our friends.
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Hear hear to that! I'm always puzzled by all these privacy nuts that go on and on about privacy problems with social media sites like Facebook. If something is absolutely private and you do not want to share it outside of one or two people, DO NOT put it on a social media site! Period. In fact, I would go as far as to say never put any critically sensitive information on the web.
well sometimes its your friends.. that will put pictures up of you without knowing, or will tag you in and can't remove it yourself
Nope. I'm not. Yes, privacy is important. However, the only information that I've ever put on Facebook is information that I'd want everyone else to know. That's why I have a Facebook; to give people who don't know me an idea of who I am and what I'm like, and get a little bit of personal branding out there. For instance, there's at least one little portion of my life that I don't want to be broadcast out to everyone…
I agree with a lot of what you're saying, and I'll miss Facebook for the very reason you like it, too. But I'm often more worried about what my friends do that can effect the amount of information out there, about me. Facebook makes it easy to inadvertently share information about your friends. That, I don't like. I'd love a replacement Facebook, one that is a little bit like Facebook used to be: relatively simple, u…
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I had a fraternity brother in college who was gay. At some point in time, he realized that he was gay, but didn't want to come out. An incriminating picture was posted on facebook and he was forced to reveal his sexual orientation to all of us (well we kinda suspected anyway) before he was ready in a pretty awkward way. He had to do the same not that long after with his family and it didn't go well at all. All becaus…
> I put the blame mainly on the person who put up the picture, but still, he should have had control over this kind of thing. Facebook isn't special ; it's just a subset of the Internet. If the people at your college had had, say, a mailing list instead, and someone had sent that picture to it (thereby putting a separate, cacheable copy in every person's inbox), would you reason similarly that "he should have had con…
I've stopped using mine, removed all apps, unfollowed (er, unliked?) all pages. I'd guess the market is ripe for a fb-type site that, for lack of a better phrase, isn't evil. And doesn't have a horrible ux.
What features should it have? (Or not have?)
1 Reasonable privacy
2 Plausible deniability (like OTR)
3 Fast updates
4 Easily customizable
5 Client-side extensible interface (Greasemonkey style)
Plausible deniability isn't that tricky, it mostly requires careful use of protocols at design phase and there is OTR to borrow.
With AJAX or dynamic JS scripts updates should be fast. The intersection of updates of contacts could be done in a single API call with multiple parameters (server-side intersection of data.) Or more scalable but a bit slower by doing multiple calls to separate server clusters (could even be calls to fetch plain files on CDN containing latest updates, aka "the wall".)
I've played a bit with zero-knowledge technologies (similar to Clipperz) and I think it's very doable. The big problem problem lies on images and video. Last year I played with HTML5/canvas with encryption but the CPU and delay is prohibitive since it requires to work on decompressed images pixel-by-pixel.
It would be nice if the major browsers started giving encryption and compression primitives to JS. And even nicer if there was an API to manage images, audio and video.
Chrome NaCl looks also very promising for this kind of disruptive technology.
Of course, the non technical problems of getting traction with users and making it commercially viable are still there just like in any other kind of social network service.
I never went in - i still don't understand the point of FB or others of their ilk. If i really want to keep in touch with far-flung family, friends - i pick up the phone or drop an email. If they are important to me i will make the effort. I also don't find the need to advertise on a daily/hourly basis what i am doing or tell people about the cool car/bike/tv/ipod etc. i bought. May be its just not for people like me…
It's not about keeping in touch. It's about hanging out and gossipping.
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Can you provide an example of facebook "selling private data"? I work there, and it would be a great surprise to me if you could.
Sure. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook#Beacon The prime example that resulted in a lawsuit settlement. I mean really? Opt-in to reveal your purchasing and browsing habits with selected companies and then spam your friends? http://gawker.com/5426176/facebooks-great-betrayal Another opt-in that is equivalent to Facebook buying web coverage at the expense of user privacy. http://gigaom.com/2010/04/22/facebooks-inst…
None of these programs involved facebook giving user data to advertisers. Even the dreaded Beacon was strictly one-way: it allowed sites elsewhere on the Web to publish to facebook, not vice versa.
Out of curiosity, do you hold Google's AdSense up to similar levels of scrutiny? You're aware that a little pixel is on about 70% of the web by hits, piping your interests, proclivities, and browsing history to Google advertisers can target you? Or is it not evil when Google does it?