You are I, we all use Facebook, hopefully for the better and not the worse.
It has opened new horizons, brought new joys, provided new opportunities and enlarged our social interaction sphere.
But as Lori Andrews shows in her book mentioned below, we need to be careful and respect a few security-related rules in order to enjoy our ride as a citizen of Facebook nation.
The following are excerpts from the book by Lori Andrews
I Know Who You Are and I Saw What You Did
[Social Networks and The Death of Privacy]
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In May 2011, Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook, attended the G8 Summit, the annual meeting of key heads of states (named after the eight advanced economies - France, the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, Japan, Italy, Canada, and Russia).
"People tell me on the one hand 'Its great you played such a big role in the Arab spring, but it's also kind of scary because you enable all this sharing and collect of information on people,' " Zuckerberg said.
If Facebook was a nation, with more than 750 million members, Facebook's population would make the third largest nation in the world.
Social networks expand people's opportunities.
Social networks also provide new ways for people to interact with the government. The White House asked its Twitter followers for comments on a tax law.
In 2011, the social network created by the city of San Francisco introduced a phone app that allowed citizens to take photos of potholes and other things that needed maintenance and upload them directly to the proper city office to order repairs.
And When people get fed up with their government, they can use Facebook, twitter, and YouTube, to incite others to join them in the streets to protest.
Social networks have become ubiquitous, necessary, and addictive.
It's easy to understand why people flock to Facebook and other social networks. but it's harder to anticipate what will happen to you when you become a citizen of this new world. If you were to move to a kibbutz in Israel, teach English in Japan, enlist in the army, or move to a rural farm, you'd have some sense of what you were getting into. When you join Facebook, you don't know enough about the ramifications of social network citizenship to understand where that decision will lead and it might transform you and your life.
Judges have been disciplined for"friending" lawyers on Facebook, even though it is completly acceptable for judges to be friends with attorneys in real life. In one case, a prison guard in England was fired after he friended prisoners on Facebook.
Facebook is unilaterally redefining the social contract - making the private now public and making the public now private. Private information about people is readily available to third parties. At the same time, public institutions, such as the police, use social networks to privately undertake activities that previously would have been subject to public oversight. Even though cops can't enter a home without a warrant, they scrutinize Facebook photos of parties held at high school students' homes. If they see the infamous red plastic cups suggesting that kids are drinking, they prosecute the parents for furnishing alcohol to minors.
Women have been fired because their Facebook posts showed them wearing provocative clothing. Straight-A students have been expelled from school for criticizing their teachers on Myspace. When, the day before a criminal trial, a cop posted on myspace that his mood was "devious", a parolee charged with gun possession used that post to persuade a jury that the cop had planted a gun on him.
A background-checking service called Social Intelligence Corp. accumulates files on the Facebook photos and posts of any user with privacy settings marked "Everyone".
Our digital identities on the Web -- email, personal websites, and social media pages -- are starting to overshadow our physical identities. As we work and chat and date (and sometimes even have sex) over the Web, we are creating a digital profile of ourselves that redefines us -- and could come back to haunt us.
Government officials used to have to obtain warrants to find out private facts about people. Now they can monitor Facebook postings and Google searches to gain access to intimate and revealing information about people.
The IRS searches Facebook and Myspace profiles for evidence of taxable transactions and the whereabouts of tax evaders.
While a student at Standford,, Harrison Tang and his friends created Spokeo, a search technology that pulls together information about million of identifiable individuals from social networks and far-flung areas of the web.
Spokeo not only compiles information from hundreds of online and offline sources -- ranging from real eastate listings to marketing surveys -- but it also uses that information to generate characterizations about individuals, such as "self-driven," donates to cause", has veterans in the house", and "collects sports memorabilia".
By entering a person's name on the spokeo website, you can view the person's address, home phome number (even if unlisted), age group, gender, ethnicity, religion, political party, marital status, family members, and education for free. Spokeo often includes a Google Maps image of the person's residence.
More than a million people search the Spokeo database each day -- making decisions about whether to hire people, grant them credit, or even have sex with them -- based on what they read. Often the information is wrong, culled from erroneous or outdated sources and interpreted by imperfect algorithms.
Spokeo is part of a sprawling multibillion-dollar industry of data aggregators -- organizations that collect information from various data repositories, such as public records, criminal databases, and social networks sites. The information is packaged in to reports and sold to organizations, such as advertising forms, businesses, government agencies, and credit card companies. The data reports can be used for employee background check, marketing research purposes, security, creating targeted mailing lists, or determining which ads appear on social networks and other websites.
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Scary. isn't it? But like everything else, Facebook is a double-edged sword.
So be careful and enjoy the connection!
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