if you put your life on social media without understanding the consequences, that is your own fault. i agree the average person doesnt understand the implications, but it is out of laziness that they do not (it's really not that complicated).
(if facebook changes their settings, that is one, thing, but if you are too lazy to look at what settings exist, that is not facebook's problem)
i totally agree that social media and facebook has become much more than pictures and text - it has a created a generation of people who want to take a picture every 5 minutes no matter how insignificant the event and upload them to "look cool". it has also created a generation of people that pour their heart and emotions out onto facebook to try to gain attention, likes, etc.
if that type of behavior comes back to bite them in the ass, im not sure it is possible to feel sorry for them though....
Jane didn't put her life on social media; her friends did.
The problem with Facebook is not what it enables or what settings it has -- it's the cultural shift, engineered by a single company, that it's socially acceptable to take pictures of your friends, post them publicly, identify them by name in a worldwide, searchable database, and preserve those pictures for eternity, all without Jane's consent.
That would have been an unthinkable invasion of privacy not twenty years ago, against an individual, and now we do that to everyone in society.
If people want to preserve their own actions, that's one thing, and it's fine not to feel sorry for them. If they want to preserve other people's actions without their consent, that's another thing entirely.
I just use FB for saying yay/nay to events people organise, turned off tagging ages ago, etc. Tried shutting it down, but missed a couple of events or had to turn them down as I heard about them too late.
However somehow I still get tagged in stuff. Worse than this at some point I got tagged as going to Hooters, not once, but three times. All stag dos in my local city (popular stag do location).
So now FB reports that my favourite place in the world is Hooters. I keep meaning to figure out how to kill it, but seriously, WTF? I didn't do a thing but apparently I'm tit-obsessed according to FB.
No. It's also public if anyone you interact with wants it to be. I have no way to prevent someone else from taking a picture of me and uploading it to Facebook with my name attached.
This is the sort of behavior that used to be the realm of tabloid journalists and paparazzi and viewed as ethically uncool; now it's expected of everyone.
I don't pity the individual who gets bitten by his or her ignorance. I fear for consequences on a much larger scale. This ignorance, well, false sense of security, will likely have broader implications in the long run. The scale and where this leads is a much bigger problem than the individual being bitten.
Not only are there issues like this, but there are also various changes in privacy policies that lead to exposed information. That can't really be blamed on individual ignorance.
If you do it voluntarily, that's your own fault. But there's no way to prevent everyone you know from tagging you in photos even if you do your personal best to be private.
i have avoided being in photos at public events for this very reason for the past two years - it's really not that hard to avoid - more of a habit at this point
Well, I do that too, but I shouldn't have to. I also tend to get pressured into being in pictures. Some people have a tendency to get offended and/or being really persistent when someone doesn't want to be in a picture. I just hate being put in that position and my point is, I really shouldn't have to.
This is an impossible task. The more you go out in public, the more likely you are to be photographed and have that photo placed in a publicly viewable place online. Even untagged photos will be fair game with facial recognition running against public photos.
Thats a bit unfair, not everyone around the world understands the privacy implications, especially compared to a subsection of people on HN who've been awoken to this issue since the dawn of the net.
Yes that doesn't preclude people from being dense either - some people should and do know better as well.
I am saying that its a spectrum, and your point is valid for one chunk of that spectrum, but not its entirety.
(if facebook changes their settings, that is one, thing, but if you are too lazy to look at what settings exist, that is not facebook's problem)
i totally agree that social media and facebook has become much more than pictures and text - it has a created a generation of people who want to take a picture every 5 minutes no matter how insignificant the event and upload them to "look cool". it has also created a generation of people that pour their heart and emotions out onto facebook to try to gain attention, likes, etc.
if that type of behavior comes back to bite them in the ass, im not sure it is possible to feel sorry for them though....