It’s how she found me. I somehow had not set it to friends only. A determined person can always find you, but you don’t have to make it easier for him.
What is it with this place and Facebook? I swear, you’d think Facebook was worse than Stormfront, the way some Dopers carry on about it.
Maybe you should be scared of the people you associate with, then, and not Facebook. I’ve left a lot of information off my page (employers, for example) and I don’t ever “check in” anywhere. No one has ever given me shit about it, not even once.
The funny thing is that I perceive a generational component in this, but the reverse of what you might think.
I’m 19 and I don’t have a Facebook account. I just don’t think it has any benefits for me.
When I tell this to friends and people at college, they generally say something like “Yeah, I don’t use Facebook much any more anyway, so I understand.”
But apparently my mom’s friends (50+) are always talking to her about how she needs to update her statuses more and participate on Facebook.
It is really funny.
Are actual people bugging you to add info to facebook? I mean, I can’t imagine a friend coming up to me (IRL or online) and saying “Hey Joey, why haven’t you added your high school or where you work to FB yet?”. OR, is FB just nudging you to add that stuff. Sometimes they’ll send out little notifications to fill in some of the blanks. Sometimes it’s even disguised to imply that it fame from a friend. ie “John added Case Western to his Education. Click Here to fill in yours” or “Missy wants you to _____” when it’s really just the app sending out the PM to all her friends.
If people are actually bugging you IRL, it’s easy enough to say “Meh, I hardly ever use facebook, I just check it like once a week” For most people that’s a pretty good answer and explains why you ‘missed’ whatever they posted online that you wanted to ignore.
I made a Facebook page just so I could read things from work related companies that I was only able to keep up with there.
And immediately got a bunch of “friend” requests from people I never heard of.
Ugh.
Not scared, just annoyed.
I don’t have a Facebook account, and never will.
I don’t have friends to speak of, and don’t really want to be constantly bothered by what little family I have left. I’m antisocial, and at this point am unapologetic about it.
Participating on Facebook would be like going to a club and walking around chatting up people to me. No, no and NO. Do not want.
The thing is, Facebook is a lot more ambitious than Stormfront, and it is not like Stormfront has a business model based on aggregating data about everyone on the Internet.
For awhile I got adds on a regular basis that “3 people have unfriended me!” heh suckers I am not ON facebook.
Obviously its probably an ad to sell a service to find out who those unfriendly bastards are.
It’s probably just malware that has nothing to do with facebook at all (unless it’s phishing for your password).
What does that even mean? Stormfront is a hate group and if anyone involved with it gets more “ambitious” than slinging racial slurs, someone’s going to jail. No one is going to jail because they shared their work history or the name of their high school with Facebook.
Why not, you know, read the rest of the post, where he explains himself?
It doesn’t sound like anyone here is actually freaked out by Facebook, but by the implications that people are willing to share information. You are finding out that people don’t value privacy as much as you thought. You are afraid that your own feelings on privacy will become an outlier, and you will be considered suspicious for doing so. You are afraid that you will be forced to divulge information you do not want to divulge.
The implications also remind you of certain horror stories about what the government or corporations can do in a world without privacy. You are afraid that this is only the beginning, and that, once sharing all this becomes the status quo, we won’t think much of even more instrusive breaches of privacy.
But, as far as I’m concerned, that’s all slippery slope thinking, and there is no real reason to fear. If anything, there is a current trend of fighting back against this. People are realizing the implications and becoming more cautious with what they share. Younger people are even starting to avoid Facebook altogether.
I’m not saying you don’t need to be cautious on Facebook. I for one don’t share much personal information at all. My public profile page is blank save for my name and a photo. My private page is missing my phone number and location, mostly because I know that information is given to marketers. My gender isn’t there, as it’s obvious to anyone who knows me, and thus only serves as bait for those spammers who pretend to be pretty women.
But this is the same thing I would do in real life and the same thing I do anywhere else on the Internet. If I feel anything about how other people are less cautious, it is incredulity. Why in the world would you put your phone number out there even though you have “friends” who you’ve not talked to in years or may just be someone who went to the same college as you? But my guess is that these people would show the same lack of caution in real life. And they are few and far in between now.
The great thing about oversharing on the internet, and by extension Facebook, is that you can ignore, hide, or unfriend the people whose lives you don’t care about.
I post a lot to Facebook, including photos, but my profile is friends only, I don’t have a lot of personal info up (school, work) and I confess that I think that people who post their personal/family drama, or check themselves in everywhere compulsively, are crazy/desperate.
“I don’t use social media” is the new “I don’t watch TV”.
The difference is that TV doesn’t generally watch you back. Nobody knows if I’m watching TV, especially if I am watching via an antenna (no such guarantees if you use a cable box).
Amusing story: Back before Facebook was available to the general public, all the kids were on Xanga. A friend’s daughter went to a Catholic high school and had a Xanga account. One of the nuns managed to get into Xanga and got every account she could find and printed the pages out and mailed them to the parents. My friend was surprised to discover that her daughter’s Xanga handle was CindyLovesTheCock.
As her “adopted uncle”, it was my job to explain the Internet Facts of Life to her. She is much more discreet these days.
Grude: It’s called “information.” If it bothers you to know what mascot someone’s middle school had, then don’t look.
I don’t understand what is scary about any of that, like at all. Or creepy for that matter. When facebook starts reading my mind and posting my sexual fetishes i might start to get worried. Unless it gets me laid, then it’s cool.
Personally, I have no sympathy for people who dox themselves, then bitch that companies actually obtain this information. After all, you are the one who put it out there in the first place.
I don’t beleive I have ever dox’d myself. At least not in public.
Beat me to it. I use Facebook for networking and self-marketing, so the stuff I post is stuff I definitely WANT people to know about me (come see my show this weekend!). I haven’t filled in my hometown, my birthday, or my relationship status (or any school prior to college, any place I’ve lived except for my current city, most of my work history except what pertains to what I’m promoting, etc. etc.). No one, not once, has ever mentioned it to me.
If your friends are nosy, that’s naught to do with Facebook.