Week 10 Board Discussions Pt 3

Author: Gwyneth Peaty
Date: Monday, November 2, 2009 1:25:19 PM WST
Subject: Reading: Facebook’s Privacy Trainwreck

danah boyd’s article raises a number of
interesting points regarding our perceptions of privacy and the
arrangement of personal information online. This is a timely reading,
as those of you with facebook will have noticed that the ‘news feed’
feature has been changed yet again. As always, a few questions to start us
off:

- Inadvertent
exposure: boyd addresses how personal relationships are transformed
into quantifiable data online. How do you feel when your daily
interactions, likes and dislikes are presented back to you as a
public ‘news feed’ or list of actions?

For those of you who use facebook, have you felt exposed as a result of
the changes in format? Do you think twice, knowing that performing an
action will produce data that is visible to all of your ‘Friends’?

Information invasion: boyd comments that “the stream of social information
gives people a fake sense of intimacy with others that they do not
really know that well. If this is true, it could be emotionally
devastating” (p17). Does the constant updating of your facebook
Friends make you feel closer to them? Is this an asymmetrical
relationship? Is it so different from ‘following’ a celebrity on Twitter?

 

I have no concerns about what I post on Facebook being visible to all, my likes and dislikes being part of the news feed is part of what Facebook is about, for me my only concern is what I post, I am not doing anything that my friends do not already know about me. If I was worried about how things that I am doing are going to look to others, I would not use Facebook.

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