Yes, of course they can – good catch there, cap’n. Your friends could also staple photocopied pages of information about you to telephone poles around your neighborhood.
Which misses the point entirely.
Yes but the issue is what perfectly innocuous information you put up over the years could reveal about you. For example I bet there are techniques for developing a psychographic profile of a person based on the material he puts up on Facebook. Any individual posting may not show much but analyzing all the material over a period of time combined with an analysis of your network could reveal quite a lot. Perhaps future employers may be able use this material to understand your strengths and weaknesses for example.
Right now I don’t believe Facebook allows this kind of access to third parties but who knows what they could do in the future. Certainly this kind of information would be valuable to a lot of companies.
I have a Facebook account for my old work email, and one for my private email, which I got for an ed board I’m on - and promptly abandoned. I see no need. I should really delete them some time. It is not so much that I’m opposed to them, but that I don’t need another time sink. The Dope does that very well.
LinkedIn is another matter, since I accept connections from people in my field, an d it is not very obtrusive. I even set up a group for a conference I’m involved with with a message board, which was actually useful. I don’t invite people - I might if I ever lose my job, though. I have other resources which can connect me far better than it.
As you said, this kind of access to someone’s social profile isn’t available yet. And even if it were, I can’t imagine any company going to the expense of doing anything like this for any job short of CEO.
I know there are people who claim that HR folks really do use your Facebook profile during the interview process to weed out malcontents, but I don’t buy it. Isolated cases, sure, but I will never believe it’s a widespread phenomenom.
It wouldn’t be that expensive. It could be automated with algorithms which search for particular phrases, words etc. and other patterns in your postings along with a similar analysis of your social network. And it doesn’t have to be a third party. Facebook could do the analysis itself. Even now I bet it has the means of developing a pretty accurate profile of anyone who posts heavily on Facebook. Perhaps it’s not a big deal but it’s the kind of thing which makes me a bit reluctant to join.
And while this kind of analysis may not be used by HR departments today I wouldn't be surprised if it becomes much more common 5-10 years down the line.10 years ago I was told the same thing about postings on message boards. It never happened other than as a scare tactic among the technologically illerate.
Facebook is different in that you use your real name (but you don’t have to!), but the idea seems equally ludicrous today. Too many profiles are locked down for employers to do this with any regularity. There’d have to be a shift in the way people think about privacy (throwing it all out there for example) to make this worthwhile for employers.
The profiles aren’t locked down for Facebook or any analytical firm connected to it. Here is the kind of business model that may develop. Employers/marketing companies/banks may contact Facebook with a list of people they want to analyze. Facebook doesn’t allow the companies any direct access to their database but conducts a psychographic analysis and provides the result to its client. Since Facebook doesn’t reveal the material directly posted by the user but only an analysis based on that material, it could claim that this doesn’t violate any user agreement.
I can’t imagine anything that could make Facebook go bankrupt faster than if they started selling psychological profiles of their users to anyone who wanted one. It’s a blunder that would be studied in colleges for centuries.
You can block specific people in Facebook so they can’t find you.
Yeah, in theory you can block people. Or be really vague about personal info. That will protect your identity. But, IMO if you do that to a level where you are “safe” from strangers, its really not going to be much of a “social site”. Might as well just keep a good email list and send out the occasional email to friends, family, and coworkers.
How did you know it was them? Do they look like they did back then or do you? I tried this with a list of classmates from high school, not one came up in a name search.
You coudn’t have found these people any other way? Or they couldn’t find you?
If you have a common name like John Smith it’d be pretty hopeless anyway.
Like I said, I can see using the Internet to meet new people. And even your quote says you GOT TOGETHER after you met. But what’s the point of interacting with people on the web.
I want to be friends with someone I actually want contact with that person, not just emailing them for years on end.
The other thing about Facebook and other social sites is you don’t know who it is. Anyone can post your picture and claim to be you.
I’m running a userscript that edits out any Google results from social networking. I’m also running one for blocking all content originating from said sites, banners, ads and so on. I’m also running a third one that disables all links to those sites… and basically censors the actual names by changing them to more humorous ones.
So no… not a huge fan of the sites.
Isn’t that an argument FOR being active on Facebook? Either way, there are plenty of ways to confirm who is who.
I suppose there are hundreds of ways of finding people - scour phone books, hire private detectives, call people who know people who know people … or you could use Facebook. Why is that way any less valuable than any other way?
Ummm…am I being whooshed?
Seriously, it’s like IMHO now requires a weekly thread in which someone proudly announces “I am not participating in an entirely optional activity that some people participate in!” And then everyone else joins in and has a good masturbatory time talking about how stupid this common optional activity is, because if you choose to post your favorite bands and amusingly-labeled pictures on the internet, then someone will make a psychographic profile of you, and then…do something with it. Oh noes!
Solution: Don’t do it, shut the fuck up about being a Luddite.
Threadshitting or irony? I suppose if unintentionally the latter, they’re not mutually exclusive…
Well, for one thing, you get to post your opinion, like in an opinion forum, about how it’s pointless to post your opinion on topics, but that you do it anyway, even though it’s pointless.
That’s one point of interacting with people on the web.
Oh yes. They might have been impostors now that I think of it. Although we all seemed to share common memories.
What the fuck are you talking about?
For me, I use Facebook to keep track of a lot of the people I work with, since they’re all (or mostly all) on Facebook. I socialize with a few of them, and started feeling a little left out since a lot was getting posted there, and there were jokes and events happening that I was out of the loop on.
Since I don’t want to use Facebook with family, or with people from high school or whatever, I simply used an alias, with the same-name alias gmail account so there are no contacts for Facebook to glean if I “accidentally” give it permission to look.
So, win-win. I’m in on whatever’s happening at work, everybody knows my alias, and I used my real picture so people know it’s me, but my family, extended family, and whoever might want to stalk me from high school or college can’t find me.