Your Privacy, Meet Silver Platter
For the record, I don't like Beacon. There are just some things I don't want to share with my friends, and more things I don't want to share with the Facebook databases. However, I'm less surprised by these events than some of my friends seem to be. Yes, it should be possible opt-out totally, or better still, opt-in if you want to. Yes, you should be able to control what goes in your newsfeed.
If you think Facebook is invading your privacy, though, you haven't stopped to think about what Facebook is, and what it does. When you join Facebook, you more or less hand them your privacy on a silver platter, and you give a little more every time you add an app. What you're really asking for is Facebook to pretend they don't have your privacy by the wrist, like some heroine on the cover of a bodice-ripper, waiting to protest mildly when she is finally taken by the pirate king.
Fortunately, because many of the features of Facebook are neat, there are technical means of disrupting the beaconstream between third party sites and Facebook, at least until Facebook decides to change their beacon URLs. The safest thing to do, though, and the thing that would send the strongest message, would be to delete our Facebooks accounts en masse.
But none of the messages I've received from my friends suggest they're lining up to do that.
Slow News Day
Student paper, politicos at odds
The roots of the writers and editors over at the Journal Star showed today when this story appeared on the front page, above the fold. When I managed to get past the turgid prose of the first couple of paragraphs—when the reporter actually starts to get into the six questions—it turned out to be a pretty funny story.
BJ Hansen, it seems, is a frat guy as well as a member of the Committee for Fees Allocation and Greeks Against the Daily Nebraskan
on facebook.com. Through his CFA work, he was involved in getting the DN's budget cut. When the crack investigative reporters at the DN found out about the Greeks Against...
connection, hilarity ensued.
I laughed out loud when I read that Hansen, through his council
, tried
the Alito gambit. ...Hansen didn’t remember joining the group, had never
participated in it and was in fact a member of many groups he didn’t
participate in.
Why Mr.
Hansen might not remember his membership in Greeks Against DN
becomes
clearer, though, when one finds that he was also a member of I've Been Drunk At 1110 New Hampshire
.
Classy!
However, when one sees the numbers—the DN has a net worth of nearly $1 million, with $225 thousand in the bank—one begins to think that maybe the CFA might have a point.
Back in the day, when I was the president of the Fencing Club on campus, I don't think I ever successfully got the DN to cover one of our tournaments, so I feel a little bit of the pain of these guys who are out with their girlfriends teeter-tottering for March of Dimes without any press coverage. On the other hand, I would much rather read about a fencing tournament than the teeter-totter thing...
But that's my bias.