Privacy continues to be a problem - entirely your problem!

Some people still ask why I'm not on Facebook (845 million users) or Linkedin (150 million users) or Twitter (over 300 million users). My one-word answer is usually, "Privacy." Maybe that's too simple but I do believe that our individual privacy rights are not a matter of the slightest concern of Facebook, Linkedin, Twitter or any other current social media network. And that goes double for Google who has recently merged all their various information gathering products under one privacy umbrella.

I recently found Dave Neal's relatively short opinion piece on the UK tech news site, the Inquirer, that explains social networks very well. The post is aptly named, "Privacy is your problem." See: http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/opinion/2163313/privacy

Neal explains [emphasis added]:

Managing a Facebook account is something of a full-time job. The company has a history of changing its privacy policies and launching applications that enroll you in some marketing and sharing exercise without your permission. This means that you must hover over your Facebook privacy settings like a hen worrying about its eggs.

It doesn't stop. This month Facebook gave its users, almost a billion of them, around a week to digest proposed changes that include among other things the renaming of the Privacy Policy to the Data Use Policy

It makes more sense when you remember that social networks - all of them - are in the business of gathering and selling your private information to others - small businesses, large corporations, governments or just about anyone with the right price of admission. They're not giving you anything for free. You have to agree to give them something they value very highly - your own privacy - in exchange for the so-called services they provide.

If you someday run into a "privacy problem" some day because some potential employer demands you provide your Facebook or other social network password and user name before you are interviewed or hired for a job, that breach of privacy is not Facebook's, Twitter's or Google's problem, it's entirely your problem.

Guy Kawasaki once famously said, "Advertising is when you tell people how great you are.  PR is when someone else says how great you are.  PR is better." What do you do when someone deliberately puts "bad PR" about you that gets connected to your Facebook page or elsewhere on the web? What if someone hacks your Twitter account? What if it's just mistaken identity like the case of a Japanese man with the same name as a man connected with a serious crime?

Sometimes you get much more than you ever wanted or originally bargained for. I still think social networks and privacy issues could get very expensive before the problems are resolved. If you eventually have a problem with Facebook, I can just about guarantee that neither Mark Zuckerberg nor 844,999,999 other people he uses won't even care. It will be entirely YOUR problem.

Things I've been reading...

Sometimes I just don't have as much time to write as I wish. Maybe it would relieve a little pressure on my guilty conscience by providing a list of some of the articles that I wish I had time to write about:

Mike Swift, "Stanford grad student investigates online privacy," SiliconValley.com, 4/3/12. Online at: http://www.siliconvalley.com/ci_20309391/stanford-grad-student-investigates-online-privacy

...The researchers and the advocates and the regulators have had to rely on the company itself to describe its practices. What Jonathan's platform has enabled, in collaboration with the (Stanford Computer) Security Lab, has been the ability to actually see what websites are really doing.

...Mayer's research most recently led to investigations by the FTC and state attorneys general in New York, Maryland and Connecticut, into Google's bypessing of the default privacy settings in Apple's Safari browser, meaning that millions of iPhone and iPad users that Google had said were not being tracked by its advertising network, in fact were having their Web data logged. 

Ryan Paul, "Ubuntu for Android: Canonical brings Ubuntu desktop to docked smartphones," ArsTechnica.com, 2/21/12. Online at: http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/news/2012/02/ubuntu-for-android-canonical-brings-ubuntu-desktop-to-docked-smartphones.ars 

One of my friends recently said he hadn't heard anything about Ubuntu running on an Android phone.  I already want one!

...Carry just the phone, and connect it to any monitor to get a full Ubuntu desktop with all the native apps you want, running on the same device at the same time as Android. Magic. Everything important is shared across the desktop and the phone in real time," Shuttleworth wrote. "It just works, the way Ubuntu should. Lots of work behind the scenes to make both systems share what they need to share, but the desktop is a no-compromise desktop.

Jobs are hard enough to find. Employers use Facebook to weed out applicants...

Is Facebook becoming a "honey pot" for employers and personnel officers who want to keep from hiring people who might cause them problems after they're hired? Steve Johnson of The Mercury News thinks so in a January 16th article, "Those Facebook posts could cost you your job." What's worse, Facebook users don't have to cut their own throat, although many Facebook users do. There's always plenty of others - often your own friends - using their Facebook account to post that picture of you that you might not post yourself. What caught my eye in Johnson's report:

In a twist on the exploding use of online social media, employers in the Bay Area and nationwide are poring over the websites to weed out job applicants whose posts reveal that they use foul language, take drugs, associate with gangs or have other questionable characteristics. Some employers are even demanding that job candidates disclose their social network user names and passwords.  [Emphasis added.]

While Johnson says the legal and ethical implications have yet to be determined in court, would you want to be an employer trying to defend your company from a drunk driving lawsuit after the plaintiff's lawyer discovers several pictures on Facebook of your new delivery truck driver behind the wheel of his own car with a beer in his (or her) hand? Would you want to hire someone who trash-mouthed their former employer on Facebook? You can read the article for more examples at: http://www.siliconvalley.com/news/ci_19754451.

In the last month, when we're starting to see reports again of newspaper reporter's articles and blogger's posts being scanned and recorded by Homeland Security, is there any doubt that Facebook, Google+ and other social media sites have become the starting point for private firms, public organizations or even an inquisitive neighbor building a dossier on almost any employee, political opponent or anyone else for that matter?

Sure, go ahead and change your Facebook privacy settings.  [Feel better now.] That may work until the next time Facebook changes their mind about what portion of your personal content will be released to the next company willing to pay a good price for your information.

I'll admit it. I don't like Facebook nor am I fond of any of the social media engines that entice people to freely exchange their personal privacy for convenience or "being cool." But then I'm just an old codger who "doesn't get it." Yep, and I don't want it either!