The downside of Facebook.Com and LiveJournal.Com · Friday May 25, 2007 by colin newell
Few people realise this so I am going to cut to the chase is it were.
FaceBook.Com and LiveJournal.Com are bad.
Bad. Bad. Bad.
Yet so many people rave about it…
Like my work-mate Mike.
Quoting Mike:
Facebook is so wonderful. So wonderful. There are thousands of users on it at our workplace. You must join. You must. Goo-goo. Gaa-gaa.
Shut-up. Whatever.
Now the truth.
Ever read the user agreement on these online communities when you sign up? Ever? ever at all? Show of hands?
Noone. As I suspected.
Dig this. When you join FaceBook.Com, they own you. And everything you deposit. All your photos and all your rants. It is theirs. Forever.
Example: Being the curious science guy I signed into Facebook (and did not read the user agreement) and joined the network that Mike suggested.
What is the first thing I see and read? It is a 19 year old student at my University straddling a toilet puking her guts out after an all-evening drinking binge. Her first and last name is there and her photo.
So. All future employers can see that she is a piss-tank. And probably not a good employee.
In an entry I spotted on LiveJournal.Com (I have a friend on there who is a witty middle-aged writer and game designer…) he has many teenage friends it seems…
One of them writes:
Hi readers. I am Julie Xxxxxxx and I am going to f—-k my boyfriend for the first time tonight
I wonder if this is the right thing to do. It is my first time.
Ok. Is what the right thing to do? Writing about it where everyone can see OR doing it with someone you have known for 3 weeks?
As we have also discovered in some study on the phenomenon of social networking sites is that GIGANTIC CORPORATIONS watch the content whilst licking their chops.
It seems that all these people spilling their whatever have softened the jobs of the marketing experts.
When a whole community decides to share every last intimate detail of their sad lives on the internet…
Well.
You fill in the blanks.
The Soprano's explained
It’s true that Facebook can be annoying sometimes. I know a girl who left Facebook when pictures just like this circulated. It sort of showed that she was dead drunk when she was actually sick (probably ate something bad). She was a kindergarten teacher and the school fired her for “misconduct.” She also had a hard time finding a new job because of that issue. She was able to task the person who posted it to take it down, but by that time, it was already on different blogs. She went to www.reputation-technologies.com for help. The company wiped out all the malicious information/pictures of her and in a month or so she was able to find a new job, without having to worry about prospective employers finding out about the pictures.
— kendra Mar 17, 01:28 am #
All in all, everything on the internet can be seen by anyone. So what I NEVER WILL understand is why people get so upset about privacy.
People should NEVER post anything they wouldn’t want seen. Post things you do want seen, because isn’t that the point?
— Tally Nov 4, 12:56 pm #
Good point. And point taken.
— Colin Newell Nov 4, 01:58 pm #