[LINK] Yet another reason why I dislike Facebook intensely

[Craig Sanders]

On Mon, Feb 21, 2011 at 08:17:11PM +1100, Kim Holburn wrote:
> http://neosmart.net/blog/2011/the-death-of-bcc/

yeah, i read that.  i'm not convinced it's facebook's fault.  there have
always been careless people who don't think before opening their mouths.

> I'll add, I use facebook grudgingly.  I use it to communicate to some
> of my younger relatives.  I dislike it intensely and I consider it
> unfit for anything related to work.

yep, i'm no fan of it either. i so have a facebook account, but i rarely
ever use it for anything except keeping track of what my friends are up
to. i almost never post anything (which makes me a facebook stalker,
i suppose). i sometimes (very rarely) use it for private messages or
chatting to people who are hard to contact any other way.

the main reason why i almost never post or do anything else on FB other
than passively read is because almost everything you do on FB do is
broadcast to *everyone* on your "friends" list. join a group, everyone
knows about it. comment on someone's post, ditto. post something
yourself, same again.

(and if your FB privacy settings allow friends-of-friends rather than
just friends, then all of their friends get to see everything you do
too)

i find that deeply disturbing.

maybe extrovert types don't mind that, or even like it ("look at me!
look at me!"), but i'm not one of them.


> If you want a serious social networking site you might consider http://linkedin.com .

i've got a LI account too. again, i rarely even log in to it.

they've developed a nasty habit of spamming too. i have a dedicated
email address which i created specifically for joining linked-in. i use
it only for LI and want all LI-related email to use only this address.
recently, they've started contacting other email addresses of mine
(which i have *never* given them and have deliberately avoided giving
them), including my rarely used gmail address. perhaps they're trying to
match up multiple online identities, or perhaps just another cold-call
type spam. whatever it is, i've had about enough of it. if i get much
more, i'll be cancelling my LI account.

worse, they allow others to spam through them, and these spams are going
to my main email address, not my special LI address. their "so-and-so
invites you" emails *used* to contain a link that would block any future
LI emails to your email address. they don't have that any more. they
don't even have an "I have NFI who this person is", all they have is a
link to accept the "invitation" to join someone's network.

actually, some or all of the "invitations" could have been LI
themselves, just spamming to get new members. dunno...but the fact that
they removed the do-not-contact-this-address-ever-again and only have an
join-LI-and-accept link makes me suspicious.


I guess i'm just not into "social networking" on the net. oddly for a
geek, i'd rather do that face-to-face than via a computer. and that's
only partly because facebook etc aren't just computer-mediated, they're
advertising-company mediated.

there's something just plain wrong about having your social interactions
and networks monitored and analysed by *advertising* companies. or
by any one company, really, but advertising & marketing companies in
particular.

that's the main reason why i use a particular browser, gnome's epiphany,
to access my gmail and other google accounts. and don't use that browser
for *anything* else...certainly not for casual browsing. i don't want
google tracking me any more than i want any other company doing that
(the Adblock and NoScript and OptimizeGoogle plugins on FF nicely take
care of google cookies, google analytics etc).

similarly, and also due to healthy paranoia, i use a different browser
solely for internet banking and never use it for anything else. i start
it up when i want to log in, and log out & exit the program as soon as
i've finished.

i've got about half a dozen browsers installed. i mainly use iceweasel
(firefox) for general browsing (because of NoScript, Adblock Plus,
No Squint, Stylish, Greasemonkey, and a few other essential plugins
- some of which work on other mozilla-based browsers too, but some
don't). iceape (aka SeaMonkey, what the old mozilla browser became)
as a secondary general purpose browser. and epiphany, midori, galeon,
konqueror, and others (including even google's chromium) for various
other special purposes.


craig

-- 
craig sanders <cas at taz.net.au>