Musings on Facebook

I’ve blogged and tweeted about this issue quite a bit lately but I think that I need to take the time to fully flesh out my thoughts. Like all social networking networking sites Facebook has its Pros and Cons, and for a while the Pros far outweighed the Cons for me. I’ve had a Facebook account since they were first opened up to High School students and I immediately got down to the business of finding friends, posting on that fabulous wall, and sharing photos with friends who’d moved away. Everything was about sharing with friends, it was like hanging out with your friends when they couldn’t be there with you. Now Facebook is flooded with apps and ads, fan pages which exist only to spread viruses or steal personal information. It’s becoming almost impossible to keep track of the amount of personal information that Facebook shares with almost anyone who asks. I posted an article earlier showing a tree of the privacy options on Facebook, and showing the evolution of the Privacy Agreement. The most recent agreement is now longer than the American Constitution. Yep, that’s right, Facebook’s privacy policy is now longer than one of the most important documents in American history. It astounds me that I can type my name into Google and come back with 100s of hits, when just two years ago I could find maybe 12 that were directly linked to me. The worst part about all this is the complete apathy from many people I talk to about this. It seems like we’ve become a generation of people completely oblivious to the consequences of our online actions. Photos of parties are posted and willingly tagged, often with comments like “Dude I was so wasted that night, you remember I hooked up with that chick”, or “OMG that night was amzing can’t wait til next week!!” I’ll admit to my share of partying, I enjoy hanging out with friends and embracing the freedom of college life, but just try and find a publicly accessible photo of me partying. I avoid cameras and camera phones as much as possible because of a justifiable paranoia of my actions being spread across the internet. With devices that can easily and discretely record events and then upload them directly, I don’t see any reason not to be concerned about someone seeing me int a potentially compromising situation. I know it’s incredibly cheesy and cliché but once it’s on the internet, there’s no getting it back. It seems like our entire generation has missed that lesson, we post our deepest and darkest secrets on sites with the assumption that they will be kept private, only to be seen by those we choose to share them with. Some of us, like myself, choose to willingly share our feelings and situations with anyone who cares to read them, but we control the flow of information about these events. I realize that I seem to be a bit of a hypocrite considering I have several public blogs and a public Twitter account, but I keep my Facebook page pretty private. The reason I’m upset and concerned about Facebook’s policies is either people don’t know or don’t care that all the information they are sharing on a supposedly secure sight, is easily accessible to anyone with an internet connection. There’s a growing movement of people threatening to cancel their Facebook accounts and I must say that I’m considering it. I’m not completely convinced that I should do so, for one thing I can keep up with my family anywhere easily, and I can easily send out event invites. Then again, I’m tired of receiving friend requests from people I’ve never met, or people who know I don’t wish to speak to them and add me just to increase their friend count. What it comes down to is the question of where Facebook goes from here. Does it continue to become more and more public until every bit of privacy dissapears? Or does it return to being a semi-private forum in which friends can openly share with each other without fear of reprisal. Of the two I found the former infinitely more likely, and perhaps we’ll soon see the rise of another social networking site which will be loved by a few at first, gain popularity and then fail as it attempts to cater to the masses. Anyway that’s just my two cents on the matter and I always welcome differing opinions, so feel free to comment.