Here’s a provocative movie that argues how Facebook users’ civil rights and civil liberties may be compromised.
My first reaction to the movie clip was to question the reliability and validity of the information presented. I clicked on the link at the bottom of the page which took me here. Not that this brings us any closer to the truth, but it does offer a place to begin further peeling back the layers.
It does seem to be a reasonable question to ask: Where does the information collected by social networking sites go? Who has access to it? What will it be used for?
This also reminded me of how often I quickly click “accept” without completely reading the terms of service or use on a number of online sites.
Popular social networking sites like The Facebook and MySpace offer virtually no organizational transparency which is a definite cause of concern.
Perhaps we will soon uncover the truth.
Keywords: civil liberties, civil rights, Facebook, MySpace, privacy, security, transparency
Comments
The site you link to is interesting. While, like you, I'd be curious to see how accurate/verifiable that information is, the underlying premise still holds: using a hosted service requires you to hand over personal information. Once you have done that, every action you perform on that service -- every mouseclick, page view, hover over an ad, you name it -- can be tracked, recorded, analyzed, and sold. This is valuable information because it allows for use patterns/trends to be cross referenced against the swath of personal information users provide.
The DoD connection is potentially disturbing, and eerily ironic: a maligned political overreach gets reborn as one of the poster children of Time's Person of the Year.
I wrote about the data integrity side of these issues a while back. There is also growing concern about the integrity of hosted data in general. But this does pale in comparison to the idea of people lining up to throw away their civil liberties.
Things like this make me happy to develop open source code.
Cheers,
Bill
I am glad that people are raising these issues about ownership and exploitation. In some recent research, I had cause to look at Facebook's terms
"By posting User Content to any part of the Site, you automatically grant, and you represent and warrant that you have the right to grant, to the Company an irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid, worldwide license (with the right to sublicense) to use, copy, publicly perform, publicly display, reformat, translate, excerpt (in whole or in part) and distribute such User Content for any purpose on or in connection with the Site or the promotion thereof, to prepare derivative works of, or incorporate into other works, such User Content, and to grant and authorize sublicenses of the foregoing. You may remove your User Content from the Site at any time. If you choose to remove your User Content, the license granted above will automatically expire." http://www.facebook.com/terms.php
I can't make any sense of that. If user content had already been reused or republished, what meaning would expiry of license have?
A very interesting post and issue. One that I've prioposed to speak to at http://talo.wikispaces.com/swapmeet07a
Surrending your anonyminity has both issue and benefit attached. It's just a matter of getting past the stress of both. As an educator this is areal and present concern particularly considering what I employed to perform.
Thanks Chris.
Wow, lots of comments on this Chris! I think this is an important topic and an important issue that many young adults are not considering when putting information on facebook/myspace/etc. My thoughts is that the privacy issues you bring to light need to be discussed in terms of a broader perspective...the lack of a media literacy education program in the US.
As new parents, my wife and I discuss television programming for kids quite often...our decision is to ban TV for my son (with the exception of sports, cause then I'd go nuts). It's not that I feel that the programming is bad, that's not the case...some of the programming out there is decent, even good. It's just that you can't get the programming without a specifically tailored message built to encourage your child to buy/eat/want McDonalds/Burger King/The Gap.
The issues with media competence and literacy are not just limited to kids and young adults. We adults think that we are capable of discerning truth in advertising, but that's just not the case. How many adults throw their hard earned money away buying trim-spa or the lateset get skinny quick pill? How many of these adults are forgoing a proper treatment for their weight issues by entertaining the idea that a pill will make them skinny?
Erik,
I don't know what TV stations you have access to, or the age of your son, but I do wonder about banning TV (absence makes the heart grow fonder). Surely the important issues are evaluation, discrimination and exercising a choice and he needs to see you do that.
I have rather sentimental recollections of my own father ( as he died when I was 17) but one of my fond memories is his introducing me to 'adult' literature. When I was around 10 or 11 he gave me this short story http://www.classicshorts.com/stories/vendetta.html by Guy de Maupassant, to read, and we talked about the human and ethical issues it raised - how she felt, what was 'right', etc. Re-reading it now it, it is a violent and disturbing tale, that would not have been on a school reading list. But I think that reading it and discussing it with my father (the key point) was a personal, educational and developmental experience for me that has stayed with me over more 10s of years than I care to admit.
It has very much helped me!