Facebook and your internet privacy
Posted on Sunday, July 22nd, 2007 at 10:21am. #
Photo by Christian Guthier on Flickr; used under cc licence
A long and massively point-missing piece on Facebook this morning on BBC Radio 4’s Broadcasting House (available to listen-again).
In it was a “fat librarian boy” who was most upset to discover a Facebook group entitled “We hate the fat librarian boy”; and a couple who’d split up but are still being kept in touch with their exes by friends via Facebook. With any internet story, you need to ask the question whether the internet is to blame, or whether this kind of thing would have happened anyway without the internet. The answer’s clearly the latter, of course.
One bloke came on, a little concerned about the etiquette of refusing friend requests. The good news (and something Facebook should be clearer on) is that if you hit the ‘ignore’ button, nobody knows: it doesn’t send back any message to the person who asked. I use it all the time - having a “must have met at least twice” rule. Nobody knows you’ve refused the request. It works just fine.
Perhaps the most interesting part of all this was someone coming on at the end and saying that if you want something private, don’t stick it on the internet. At all. Ever.
In order to underline that point, I thought I’d go and look for how much updating information I could find on the internet about my activities online. And it turns out that there’s quite a lot. You can view my stalkerfeed, as I’ve christened it, on my website.
Through publicly-available RSS feeds, you appear to be able to view a large amount of information about me. This kind of information is available for many of us; if we use last.fm, or Facebook, or Twitter, or many other systems, it’s quite possible to piece a ton of information together about us all. Particularly if we use the same username on all of these systems.
When at Virgin, I had the real benefit of having student placements embedded in my department. The interesting thing is watching their normal internet use; because you learn a lot from it. My practice of using the same username on everything appears to be completely alien to ‘the youth of today’; not only do they use a dazzling amount of different usernames, they’re also using names that seemingly don’t tie back at all to their identities, or are suffixed with seemingly random numbers. I don’t know enough about whether they do this on purpose, but the net result is that you cannot easily do the same ’stalkerfeed’ exercise on them. My enjoyment on getting my ‘real name’ on Gmail, for example, clearly isn’t shared by them - apparently preferring random and weird names on their own Gmail accounts, for example, instead of their own names - even when their names are still available.
Those concerned about internet privacy should perhaps learn something from those students; where you don’t want to leave a trail of data, don’t use the same username on everything. Simple, innit? (If only we all thought that way…)
