Google Maps/Earth doesn’t even have decent images of this country(Trinidad&Tobago) not even road overlays, and half the aerial images are totally obscured by clouds.
Yet go on Facebook and every single person has their full school history fully viewable back to preschool, Facebook has a page along with school insignia for every single school in the country no matter how small, obscure, or no longer even existing :eek: Ditto for full entire work history, probably every company with more than 5 employees is there with logo and page. I fully realize these are uploaded by users.
People post Four square updates so I know exactly what coffee shop they are at, its creepy to look back at them over time.
I understand this is all voluntary, doesn’t change the fact it is so goddamn creepy. People desperate for strangers to have a more detailed dossier on them than anyone has any business seeing.
And the whole being creeped out by people who don’t have this insane life detail out there on Facebook is already old hat.
*I have a Facebook page my wife created and maintains mostly for posting toddler pics.
Privacy issues in general are worrisome to me, but Facebook specifically, not so much. The tone of your post seems to be more “I am venting annoyance at other people who behave in ways I don’t approve of” than “I am worried about privacy.”
It isn’t so much that I’m annoyed at <them> I mean if they want to upload 24/7 video so what, but what I am annoyed at is this becoming a societal norm basically and only getting worse. I already get people commenting on my Facebook, it is scary to think you’ll be weird if you don’t disclose all this along with 5 second GPS updates.
Why in the world would I care in the slightest if someone knows where I work or what my college or high school was? I’m not on the run from the law or ashamed of my life, and I don’t have panic attacks about relative strangers seeing that info.
If you want to hermetically seal your life knock yourself out.
It is the totality of the info, every school attended from preschool to university, every employment from teenage years to present day, full family tree, full group membership(granted friend trees are so bloated as to be meaningless), various other profile info like political affiliation, photos of extracurricular activities, hourly-daily GPS location updates, various rants and thoughts.
:pI wouldn’t even give a shit if people would stop bugging me about my lack of desire to create a similar page, forget the creepy it is also a lot of effort.
I think I know what you’re getting at, OP. When Foursquare first came out, a bunch of my friends jumped on the bandwagon. I presume there must be some kind of privacy filter on it; nevertheless, I found it, and still find it vaguely creepy in the you’re-giving-the-masses-free-rein-to-stalk-you sense. When I mentioned it to a couple of these friends, they thought I was being too paranoid for my own good :shrug:
I find the dossier sense of FB a bit perplexing to fathom, too. I too know people who have filled out that “FB dossier” with anything and everything. I don’t want the general public, or even my FB friends (unless they’ve been close friends for a really really REALLY long time) to know every single thing about me. But hey, a lot of people think different.
Lets just say I DON"T have a Facebook account. And when I am forced to it will be under the name of Buck Naked, Architect. So, yeah you are not the only one.
I’m kind of scared of people who point out how scary Facebook is. What kind of nefarious horror are you imagining might be done with the information about which preschool I went to or where I worked in 2006?
I am not actually SCARED of it. Its just the point where I’ve decided for now to draw the line between my personal life and the internet. Friends and family I know can know all this stuff I WANT them to know without using Facebook. And given the founder appears to be a prick I am not doing anything to increase his business.
Once its on the internet, its there. I am so glad I am not some teenager with internet access. Gawd know’s what damage to their future they could cause.
I never post personal information on any of these sites now, especially since a psychotic girlfriend from 40 years earlier contacted me once. Fuck–that.
Meh. Everything I post is set to Friends Only and I don’t friend people I’ve never actually met if they’re not already friends with a decent number of my friends (and usually unless I recognize their name from them commenting on those friends’ posts). I’m sure Mr. Zuckerberg has everything I’ve ever posted or answered about myself on Facebook in one of the secret storage servers in the subsubsubbasement, but I don’t really CARE. Most of it’s innocuous, useless, trivial information that nobody would ever even bother tracking down. FB has never seen my Social Security number or my credit card number, so I’m not worried about that.
I don’t get why people get like this with facebook. You have to keep in mind, the only thing that Facebook knows is the information you give it. It’s not that by virtue of setting up an account it magically has this information. When you look at someone’s facebook page and see where they work or live, it’s because they typed that information in there. If you don’t want people to see that or facebook to know it, just leave it blank, no one’s going to care.
If you want to be concerned, go check out Spokeo or Whitepages.com. Facebook book might be gathering information, but only the information you offer up to it.
I agree. My default permission setting is “Friends”, not Public. I don’t befriend people I don’t know. I keep apps turned off virtually all the time (if for some peculiar reason I want to use an app I turn on apps only as long as I need in order to use the app) since I have no interest in playing Facebook games. Since my friends list is small I more or less trust everyone on it, and in any case I am reasonably careful about what I post (comes from being a “fence-sitter”; I have FB friends that are much more extreme than I am in strongly opposed attitudes).
As the old saying goes, practice “Safe Hex” with everything on the Internet.
One of my most fringe theories is that “privacy” is slowly but surely becoming an antiquated concept. I think in just a couple of generations from now people will think it was strange that we didn’t share things like salary, or how much money we have saved in our 401k, or our stance on religion.
And this thing we got going on with the NSA right now wouldn’t even make a blip on their radar.
This is just a weird statement to me. Stalkers can also use the US mail or the telephone, and yet nobody swears off either of those things on the outside chance that someone might contact them when they don’t want to be contacted. Not to mention which, on Facebook, with a click of a button you can easily block the unwanted person so that they can never even see your profile again, which is a lot more difficult to accomplish with the USPS or the phone company.
Edit: To be completely clear, Facebook irritates the shit out of me (even though I still use it) and I find a lot of their business practices annoying and obnoxious. But being afraid of it, or terrified to post anything for fear that some spectre from the past will pop up to haunt you? No.
