While I sat at lunch yesterday eating my high protein, starting Atkin’s again, hamburger patty and a caesar salad, I came across an interesting article in the Oregonian. The article Why the ‘tell-all generation’ is cleaning up its act by guest columnist Annika Tohlen caught my eye, as we all know I’ve been giving Facebook the stink-eye as of late. (kill a few birds (not really peta) with one stone; facebook & privacy & on Facebook a discussion I hope you can’t read unless on my friend list.)
The part that grabbed my attention in Tohlen’s article was that a person of the MySpace/Facebook generation is questioning their privacy. She comments that “Most college students today have had at least one social networking profile since high school.” After reading a NYTimes article on the same subject, centered around how many college students today are questioning why they put the dirty laundry out for all to see, Tohlen too questions why.
Over the years I’ve watched my younger, and not so young, cousins and friends put status updates up or comments that they wish they hadn’t. Or place comments that one would normally only say in ones head and not in public. But for some reason, not only a generation that grew up with MySpace and Facebook are putting their intimate thoughts on the net, everyone seems to be doing it.
It’s gotta be big if it has it’s own blog, it being posts that shouldn’t have happened: Facebookfails.com .
I’m not sure on the why, but I do intend to find out, but the key is it’s an issue and Tohlen nailed it when she said; “For a while, I pushed back against this paranoia. I staunchly defended my right to use my Internet space however it seemed right to me. After an incident my freshman year, however, when one of my friends was cyber-stalked by an upperclassman through Facebook, my group of friends and I wised up and set our privacy settings to the highest level possible. But in the two years since that incident, Facebook has repeatedly and dramatically changed its user privacy settings, rendering our previous settings useless.”
It used to be you only had to worry about what dumb ass would post a pic of you doing naughty things on a Friday night but the real concern is, will everyone (a new boss including) else be able to see it.
This is why I simply gave up on Facebook. It’s a lot of work to continually have to monitor the changes they make to the privacy controls and what the unintended results of those changes.
If you don’t want to have to worry about your information making it out into the open, just don’t put it up on a service based website like Facebook or MySpace or any of the other social networks out there.
The only way to control information about yourself on the Internet is to NOT put it up in the first place.
.-= Riley´s last blog ..YOU ARE AN RSS SLUT! =-.