Blog Post 4: Online Privacy

          Online Privacy is the single component of social networking that keeps me around. Facebook is one the biggest social networking sites currently trying to bend the rules on privacy. How so? By infiltrating us with these so called ‘Frictionless Sharing Applications’. Spotify, one of the new frictionless sharing apps, is a new experiment set up by Facebook, to try and get Facebook users comfortable with this full on media sharing. Spotify is an application, much like itunes, but it posts every song that the user listens to on his/her ‘wall’. I’m personally a fan of Spotify, but I doubt all 587 of my friends are. Every time I listen to a song, it gets sent to the news feed where my friends and family view it. Facebook is slowly constructing a social media site that bombards us with information that is not related to our interests and likes. The Guardian is another application that is currently in act along with Spotify in this early experimental stage. The Guardian is basically a news media site, created by Facebook, which automatically posts to your wall whatever stories you view. Once you accept the applications download, it starts posting information without asking your permission to. This sprouts up major issues with me. First off, I really do not care that ‘Tom Dean is reading an article on great fishing in Maine this summer’. Second of all, I like reading weird articles that have to do with alien sightings and strange pictures from the moon that NASA has decided to hide from us all along. The last thing I want is for all my friends to see that I am an enthusiast for the extra-terrestrial and bogus stories posted on aol.com.

            Facebook is trying to make it so that every action that we do on their site is recorded and posted so others can see it. Usually when I am on Facebook I am doing stuff that I would be incredibly embarrassed about if everyone somehow found out. Most of my ‘Facebook-ing’ time is spent stalking old ex-girlfriends, friends from highschool that I probably will never talk to again, and creeping on my friends pictures. If the users have no privacy to their actions then I would not be surprised to see a rise in the amount of Google + users. Facebook was originally created so that college guys could find out what girls are single. Now if we go on their profile to check, they will be notified of our actions. It is almost frightening how much personal information I have on Facebook built up over the years and with the absence of privacy this information could be handed over to someone who can use it against me.
            “We’re sort of in a position right now where people are experimenting about how comfortable they are sharing this or sharing that, and I would be really surprised if the end result is we share everything all the time,” Rebecca Jeschke, spokeswoman for the digital privacy group Electronic Frontier Foundation, said. “Clearly that’s what marketers want, and clearly that’s what companies want, but it’s really important for consumers to think about what they want.”


-Clay


http://www.poynter.org/latest-news/media-lab/social-media/147638/with-frictionless-sharing-facebook-and-news-orgs-push-boundaries-of-reader-privacy/