If you think the Facebook privacy issues can’t affect you, you need to hear from Maria Langer about her recent social networking experiences. Maria describes how Facebook created a “community page” about her, without her acknowledgement or consent, and invited anyone and everyone to “help.” Facebook’s privacy settings can be a double-edged sword, revealing and restricting your content at the same time. Maria talks about that, as well as the pressure she has been receiving to more actively participate on Facebook and other forms of social media, why that participation is so different from posting things to her blog or having a Wikipedia page, and how easy it is to lose control of one’s online identity. Think it can’t happen to you? It happened to Maria, and she hopes you can learn from her story.
Links:
Subscribe to MacVoices in iTunes
MacLevelTen – The Mac Media Group
An Eclectic Mind – Maria Langer’s personal blog
Office 2008 for Mac: Small Business Projects at lynda.com
The Facebook Decision on Maria’s blog
Connect with Facebook? on Maria’s blog, An Eclectic Mind
I’ve listened to this podcast three times now. I found Maria’s Facebook experience very scary. I plan on re-scrutinizing what I have out there in the social networking ethernet. Thank you for a very informative article.
Wasn’t intended to scare, but more to inform and let people know there are real reasons to pay attention. That said, the aspect of a community page being created without the individual’s consent does cross over into distressing territory.
Thanks for listening!
A double-edged sword is the best way to describe Facebook’s privacy settings. I don’t understand why most social-networking sites even have privacy statements and setting, because in reality you really don’t have control over your privacy. Furthermore, you give up any other rights once you join those sites, giving them license to use any content you post however they see fit. A new privacy- and security-based social-networking site, called zeldaB.com allows user to maintain all your rights to privacy, without giving up anything. At zeldaB, there are no hidden terms and conditions, and the policy is simple and easy to understand.
Check it out at http://www.zeldab.com.