I’ve finally done it, been sucked into the evil that is Facebook. It crept up so silently too with an innocent little thought: “why not join Facebook to reach a wider audience for my dissertation?” and before you know it I was at the FB homepage giving away my life story.
Okay, bit of an exaggeration but I have to say my I wasn’t surprised at how much information FB tries to pry from you. First I had to give my name, a username and email. Okay, not so bad, that’s already out there on countless sites anyway (many of which I can’t even remember).
Then the worry started. It spewed out a list of possible friends, lots that i’d known years before. Where does this list come from? It hadn’t data-mined my email contacts afaik since that request came next (and I promptly refused) so i’m not altogether sure. Fallingstar reckons it might be other people have tried to find me in the past, but considering some of them were only a minor acquaintance that’s a bit dubious (and i’m not that likeable!!)
Then it wanted me to complete my profile – not just an ‘about me’ and an ‘interests’ blurb, oh no, it wanted every school/college or occupation i’ve ever held (and in horror i’ve since discovered many of my relations have divulged the lot). Needless to say I only gave out the minimum necessary.
I added a couple of friends – Fallingstar at her own insistence, damn (j/k) – then I did my usual and pulled up the settings page to see what was what. For starters, FB allows you to restrict access to certain parts of your profile etc to certain groups of people,’friends only’ and ‘everyone’ for example. More worryingly, there’s also a ‘friends of friends’ category which, to me, seems to imply that a bunch of randoms will see my information unless I turn it off. Oh and most of the options are set to this choice so if you’re not aware you’ll be splurged all over FB before you know it. Okay, I get that the idea is to build a community and it’s a simple way of broadening people’s contacts, but why do it in this way? Why not let people themselves decide to share their information with strangers (interestingly, there’s no ‘share with no-one’ option either).
I also discovered another option which, unless you turn it off, means that when your friends play a game or run a FB application, that software can mine your information too for reasons such as to suggest sending a birthday card if your birthday is coming up (and some not so nice reasons also come to mind).
So yeah, i’ve joined the dark side. I know, I know, it’s probably not as bad as I think. I’m a paranoid old fool, but in this day and age with identity theft as prevalent (and easy) as it is, we have to be careful. It all comes down to the question of whether I trust the intentions of my fellow (wo)man. Do I hell.
P.S. On a positive note, i’ve also joined Twitter (yay!), so now I can follow much more interesting ppl than little ol’ me, like Stephen Fry. I might consider putting a twitter badge up here, but only if I find myself tweeting often, otherwise i’m probably not worth following;-)
