Why You Should Care About/Defend Your Privacy

This is really good...

Rainey Reitman, the Activism Director at The Electronic Frontier Foundation, took the time to write a special article for Lifehacker.

"Why You Should Care About and Defend Your Privacy"
http://lifehacker.com/5904966/why-you-should-care-about-and-defend-your-privacy

You could follow all the (excellent) links embedded in this article and it would take you a week to read them all.

Good stuff.

 

First comment in that article sums it up pretty well. My FB profile is public, but I do not reveal sensitive info, which could be used for ID theft, like my address or a real birthday, since in my country, it is used for identification like a social number in US. But unfortunately, it is all available online for public anyway, by government itself.

 

Just came to post the same.
This should resonate everywhere.
Need to hold the line.
It seems the 'connected generation' has a different concept of privacy to mine.

 

My nephews and nieces are crazy with that social media stuff. When they listen to me talk they smile but I can tell they haven't a clue on security issues. There is a balance and its not that tough to avoid the major pitfalls of FB.

 

You raise an interesting point here. ^^^^

For me, there's really three concerns with Facebook:

• Privacy settings that are simple, easy-to-follow, and - consistent.
• What you have "behind the wall" that FACEBOOK has access to and how they use it (or not).
• Third-party sharing of data that is technically marked as "private." (See above)

So, in theory, if you set this to that and that to this and mark that off-limits and this public and so on and so on, you might feel secure in that you are avoiding the major pitfalls of Facebook - but are you really? And I'm not just referring to their constantly changing the rules and exposing information that people thought they had marked as private, only to learn that things have changed and they need to check new defaults all over again.

There are two things to keep top-of-mind: What you tell Facebook they can show the world, your friends and what's private; and what Facebook really does with all of that other information. And they really are two different problems.

For me, I don't do Facebook. Period. I think Path has the right idea in promoting a very tight circle of friends. And the "friends" really are your friends. (Imagine that.) And you're limited to 150 friends. (Here's their reason why). Path will appeal to people who don't feel the need to play High School with Facebook and run up the number of "friends", post trivial information that sometimes promotes cliques and leaves others out and all that brings back that awkward high school feeling. Path is what Facebook should be.

This is a long way of saying, Palancar, that you are right that setting up Facebook with just the right tweaks (to make it as private as possible) can make it usable in that sense. But, it doesn't address the activity behind the wall by Facebook itself.

It's a brave new world.

 

Amen. No question that most young people have no real understanding at how privacy was once a hallowed concept that walked hand-in-hand with freedom.