Social media and human stupidity
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Rage wrote:
My kid will be seeking a job in about 20 years from now. We do not know how society evolves, maybe one thing he did as a child in the video that seems perfectly normal today will be considered completely disrespectful in twenty years
By the same argument it might mark him out as an oddball-weirdo because there are no photos or videos of him on the net. You won't win any prizes trying to predict the future.
Caslen wrote:
You won't win any prizes trying to predict the future
I do not want to win anything, I want to avoid him loosing before having ever started to fight. He will still be able to add pictures of him, later, or get a facebook profil, or ... And noone but he will do it. All in his hands. The opposite would imply being able to remove data/pics/etc... which is exactly what you can't do.
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The company is not incompetent. The users are. A company exists for one and only one reason: to make money. Their only responsibility is to the bottom line, and to shareholders if they have them. Anyone who wishes to ascribe other motives or some higher social purpose to a for profit corporation is both deluded and a prime target for exploitation. Beyond the constraints of the law, a company has zero obligations to anyone or anything outside their profit structure. It is not malice to use your assets in the most profitable manner possible. It's business. The fact that people believe otherwise is one of many reasons contributing to their ill advised online behavior. For some reason, the general public seems to believe that web sites and other free services exist because they wish to provide that service "to the people," for the exclusive and purely benevolent sake of doing so. The fact of the matter is that these companies provide services, free or otherwise, with the goal of making money. Viewed from this less altruistic (and more realistic) perspective, the actions of companies such as Facebook are, in a word, predictable. A few brave souls in the business world have come out and said the unthinkable. Someone (I forget who) recently said that you have no privacy - get over it. Google (you know, those Don't Be Evil guys) said that you shouldn't be concerned with privacy unless you're doing something wrong. Facebook and others are merely echoing reality, and they're correct. Privacy, both online and increasingly offline because of shifting social patterns, is in fact obsolete. We can cling to idealistic dreams, click our little heels together three times and wish it were otherwise, but the facts won't change. And of course, this was the point of my post in general. There's no such thing as online privacy. Consequently, your only defense in that regard is exercising common sense in terms of what you type into a machine. Doing so with the assumption of "if it can be used, it will" is a good benchmark for decisions on any information activities. Hey, if you can create the perfect world, save me a seat. In the meantime, I'm busy trying to navigate the one that exists. :)
Christopher Duncan www.PracticalUSA.com Author of The Career Programmer and
While true that users should pay attention to what they're agreeing to it's also a fact that most users refuse to read any dialogs and just hit enter/ok/whatever to dismiss them. As a result a well designed application needs to provide the least dangerous/most reversible option by default. For privacy settings that should be "keep my data private" not "share it with the entire world". The risk with the former is that someone you intended to let see the information will have to send you a message indicating that they don't have access. The risk with the latter is that embarrassing material is spread to anyone who's trying to snoop on you. The latter has both a larger scope of risk, and can create irreversible problems (you can't make someone 'unsee' your data after they already have) and should not be the default as a result.
3x12=36 2x12=24 1x12=12 0x12=18
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Remember that the young generation (late teens, early twenties) view sharing "life experience" as a natural part of their own life and do not really care about repercussions; it's part of their life. They will post a lot of things that us old ones will never post because we live in a world of conformism and overly "political-correctness". As for private things, I've seen a lot more private information posted by adults than by young ones. Society change and, even for me a liberal (heck socialist leftist) open minded person, it change fast and is hard to follow. Somewhat unrelated, I've been using public transport for most of my life, and I noticed a couple of years ago that more and more bus drivers (generally a more conservative job position) are younger than I am and a lot of them have visible tattoos (arms, neck, ...) and piercings; just to show that the society change and the younger generation is taking the place that we leave and they bring their own life experience. I'm certain that if I get sick/injured I will probably be handled by someone with tattoos and piercings with a Facebook page with pictures of parties and beach scenes and other more private information.
This signature was proudly tested on animals.
Maximilien wrote:
do not really care about repercussions
No one cares about repercussions until they experience them.
Christopher Duncan www.PracticalUSA.com Author of The Career Programmer and Unite the Tribes Copywriting Services
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While true that users should pay attention to what they're agreeing to it's also a fact that most users refuse to read any dialogs and just hit enter/ok/whatever to dismiss them. As a result a well designed application needs to provide the least dangerous/most reversible option by default. For privacy settings that should be "keep my data private" not "share it with the entire world". The risk with the former is that someone you intended to let see the information will have to send you a message indicating that they don't have access. The risk with the latter is that embarrassing material is spread to anyone who's trying to snoop on you. The latter has both a larger scope of risk, and can create irreversible problems (you can't make someone 'unsee' your data after they already have) and should not be the default as a result.
3x12=36 2x12=24 1x12=12 0x12=18
Dan Neely wrote:
As a result a well designed application needs to provide the least dangerous/most reversible option by default.
While I would certainly agree with that from a philosophical point of view, in the context of what I was talking about it is completely incorrect. From the business point of view, a well designed application needs to do whatever will generate the greatest revenue / profitability for the company. For-profit companies do not exist to save the whales. They exist to make money. As such, company software exists to further that goal. Now, if you can show how your recommended settings will make them more money than their approach, you'll get their attention. But I suspect your observations are not based on profitability, but rather personal idealism. Companies don't care about ideals unless they explicitly serve as stepping stones to an enhanced bottom line.
Christopher Duncan www.PracticalUSA.com Author of The Career Programmer and Unite the Tribes Copywriting Services
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Christopher Duncan wrote:
What concerns me is the cultural shift that paints blatantly stupid acts as perfectly normal.
Meh... I've read a bit of history. Apparently, this was pretty much standard operating procedure as far back as the 1960s... :rolleyes: More seriously, I remember sitting in class back around '00, laughing with my classmates at local gals stupid enough to put their "personal details" on some matchup website. It was better than Jerry Springer (a TV show that sorta filled the same role in the previous decade).
Shog9 wrote:
Apparently, this was pretty much standard operating procedure as far back as the 1960s...
I didn't realize you'd been to some of my gigs. :)
Christopher Duncan www.PracticalUSA.com Author of The Career Programmer and Unite the Tribes Copywriting Services
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Read a couple of articles this morning from the /. feed about Facebook's new privacy settings, their implications, yada, yada. One was an interview with an alleged Facebook employee. I say alleged because Internet articles by and large bear no resemblance to traditional journalism in terms of credibility. My mother's pet fish could write an article stating that someone in a position of political power sacrifices small children nightly. That wouldn't make it true. But I digress... The thing in these articles that really got me thinking was the way that people use social media indeed web sites in general. The Facebook interview article talked about the fact that every scrap of information, including all of your actions, clicks, etc., was stored forever in the database. As a geek, my gut level response to that was, "Well, duh." Of course they store everything under the sun in the db. If it can be done, it will be done. What amazes me is the casual manner in which people type private information into a web site, as though it is somehow protected because in version 1.0 you don't see any avenue for it to be displayed beyond the bounds of what you intended. But there it is, in the database like a ticking time bomb, just waiting for some bright eyed developer to use that data as a "feature" in 2.0. A company has an agenda of its own, which likely has very little in common with yours. This is the same thing that makes me shake my head about the cloud hype. We are becoming accustomed to indiscriminately placing our data on other people's machines at an ever increasing rate. I'm not a fan of the cloud cult, but businesses might at least give some thought to having their data held hostage or worse, leaked to the public. To the average person on Facebook, this isn't even a minor consideration. People pour their hearts out, revealing highly personal and potentially damaging information, into a database belonging to a company. If I was going to add a new example of stupidity to the dictionary, this would be my first choice. Of course, human stupidity is nothing new, and we all love to laugh at the Darwin awards because so much of it is obviously, well, stupid. What concerns me is the cultural shift that paints blatantly stupid acts as perfectly normal. You'll probably never see a Darwin award about someone who spewed too much personal stuff into someone else's database because increasingly, we just consider that normal behavior. And I'm not even sure there's anything that can be done about it in terms of edu
Christopher Duncan wrote:
What amazes me is the casual manner in which people type private information into a web site
Yes! Like this one guy, told everyone about his dating days with a stripper dancer. ;)
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Dan Neely wrote:
As a result a well designed application needs to provide the least dangerous/most reversible option by default.
While I would certainly agree with that from a philosophical point of view, in the context of what I was talking about it is completely incorrect. From the business point of view, a well designed application needs to do whatever will generate the greatest revenue / profitability for the company. For-profit companies do not exist to save the whales. They exist to make money. As such, company software exists to further that goal. Now, if you can show how your recommended settings will make them more money than their approach, you'll get their attention. But I suspect your observations are not based on profitability, but rather personal idealism. Companies don't care about ideals unless they explicitly serve as stepping stones to an enhanced bottom line.
Christopher Duncan www.PracticalUSA.com Author of The Career Programmer and Unite the Tribes Copywriting Services
Not upsetting your customers does feed directly into the bottom line. One of MySpace's bigger problems while facebook was eating its lunch was that in the pursuit of higher ad revenue myspace was plastered with the disgusting diet/teeth whitening snake oil ad campaigns and eschewed ajax in favor of options that generated more page loads to boost the number of ad impressions. The more disgruntled your customers are the more likely they are to jump ship for the next big thing immediately instead of waiting for you to implement your own version. It's a balancing act, but in this case I think FB is tilting the wrong direction.
3x12=36 2x12=24 1x12=12 0x12=18
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Not upsetting your customers does feed directly into the bottom line. One of MySpace's bigger problems while facebook was eating its lunch was that in the pursuit of higher ad revenue myspace was plastered with the disgusting diet/teeth whitening snake oil ad campaigns and eschewed ajax in favor of options that generated more page loads to boost the number of ad impressions. The more disgruntled your customers are the more likely they are to jump ship for the next big thing immediately instead of waiting for you to implement your own version. It's a balancing act, but in this case I think FB is tilting the wrong direction.
3x12=36 2x12=24 1x12=12 0x12=18
I agree with you completely on this. One of the overall themes when I wrote Unite the Tribes was the dangers of short term thinking, and it's rampant in the tech industry. Like you, I believe that continued efforts in this direction will ultimately alienate Facebook's customers. That may not produce tangible results today, but when the Next New Thing does show up, I suspect it will happen exactly as you predict. Unfortunately, I think all the Facebook managers are hearing from the backlash is "privacy as an idealistic issue." I doubt seriously that anyone outside or inside their organization has managed to connect the dots for them in a way that's meaningful from a business perspective. Which is, of course, pretty much the norm out there. They're going to learn this lesson the hard way.
Christopher Duncan www.PracticalUSA.com Author of The Career Programmer and Unite the Tribes Copywriting Services
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Christopher Duncan wrote:
What amazes me is the casual manner in which people type private information into a web site
Yes! Like this one guy, told everyone about his dating days with a stripper dancer. ;)
You actually believe that stuff? :-D
Christopher Duncan www.PracticalUSA.com Author of The Career Programmer and Unite the Tribes Copywriting Services
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Rage wrote:
My kid will be seeking a job in about 20 years from now. We do not know how society evolves, maybe one thing he did as a child in the video that seems perfectly normal today will be considered completely disrespectful in twenty years
By the same argument it might mark him out as an oddball-weirdo because there are no photos or videos of him on the net. You won't win any prizes trying to predict the future.
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I agree. Don't ever publish anything you are not willing to stand up for, be it on the web, or a book. The Internet has brought an openness and transparency that has never been seen before. I'm hoping it'll do more good than harm in the long run.
-- Kein Mitleid Für Die Mehrheit
In our last provincial election (British Columbia, Canada), there was a new young candidate with the opposition party that had was looked at a up and comer. But then some inappropriate photos (him manhandling a young ladies breasts) from his facebook page started making the rounds in the news, and he ended up having to drop out of the election. I also found that when I applied for my last fulltime job with a large company, not only did they check all my references, but they also reviewed various social networking sites about myself. Moral of the story: don't post anything that might embarrass you later in life, or deal with the consequences.
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Read a couple of articles this morning from the /. feed about Facebook's new privacy settings, their implications, yada, yada. One was an interview with an alleged Facebook employee. I say alleged because Internet articles by and large bear no resemblance to traditional journalism in terms of credibility. My mother's pet fish could write an article stating that someone in a position of political power sacrifices small children nightly. That wouldn't make it true. But I digress... The thing in these articles that really got me thinking was the way that people use social media indeed web sites in general. The Facebook interview article talked about the fact that every scrap of information, including all of your actions, clicks, etc., was stored forever in the database. As a geek, my gut level response to that was, "Well, duh." Of course they store everything under the sun in the db. If it can be done, it will be done. What amazes me is the casual manner in which people type private information into a web site, as though it is somehow protected because in version 1.0 you don't see any avenue for it to be displayed beyond the bounds of what you intended. But there it is, in the database like a ticking time bomb, just waiting for some bright eyed developer to use that data as a "feature" in 2.0. A company has an agenda of its own, which likely has very little in common with yours. This is the same thing that makes me shake my head about the cloud hype. We are becoming accustomed to indiscriminately placing our data on other people's machines at an ever increasing rate. I'm not a fan of the cloud cult, but businesses might at least give some thought to having their data held hostage or worse, leaked to the public. To the average person on Facebook, this isn't even a minor consideration. People pour their hearts out, revealing highly personal and potentially damaging information, into a database belonging to a company. If I was going to add a new example of stupidity to the dictionary, this would be my first choice. Of course, human stupidity is nothing new, and we all love to laugh at the Darwin awards because so much of it is obviously, well, stupid. What concerns me is the cultural shift that paints blatantly stupid acts as perfectly normal. You'll probably never see a Darwin award about someone who spewed too much personal stuff into someone else's database because increasingly, we just consider that normal behavior. And I'm not even sure there's anything that can be done about it in terms of edu
Christopher Duncan wrote:
someone in a position of political power sacrifices small children nightly.
What? :omg: No way, really? Who does this, exactly, and why hasn't it gotten onto all the other blogs I never stop reading yet? Oooh, better start hitting that Refresh button PRONTO!