Comments on: Facebook considered harmful?

By: Jule Farah

Jule Farah — Sat, 15 Nov 2008 19:31:25 +0000

but no it is a facebook issue because facebook is not deleting that user by that allowing him to ruin my reputation !

By: Jule Farah

Jule Farah — Sat, 15 Nov 2008 19:30:33 +0000

tell me about it …

By: dnorman

dnorman — Sat, 15 Nov 2008 19:26:10 +0000

that’s not really a facebook issue as much as “your friends are assholes” issue.

By: Jule Farah

Jule Farah — Sat, 15 Nov 2008 18:46:20 +0000

Facebook is harmful… take this for example, somebody created a user and uploaded all MY photos as if he were me cursing at people and getting me in fights. I’m not the first victim of that horrible assault. Somebody also created a user in my girlfriend’s name and uploaded all her photos. He added all boys from our area and told them bad things making my friend look like a “slut”. I hope Facebook finds a solution for this privacy assault. I don’t want to use facebook ever again neither do my friends just because of this incident.

By: entuli

entuli — Thu, 21 Feb 2008 04:24:55 +0000

Facebook considered harmful?I agree with some of your concerns. It is disturbing when children expose themselves on-line. I think as educators should start in class to teach children as early as from elementary the importance of “knowing what you are giving up for what you are getting” as somebody put it. In technology classes teachers should teach the kind of information that should be made secret and not to be put on-line and also information that is solely made for online purposes. Teachers should give concrete examples from newspapers or online-news that show real people like them getting into problems. In this way the problem appeals to their emotions. Parents at home should compliment the education that students get from school. They should not assume that it is only the responsibility of teachers. You have a point when it comes to the universities failing to provide space online for students to carry on with their work after graduating. Universities should do something about it.
The only time I have a second opinion is when you said -‘ an entire generation of our upcoming best-and-brightest minds are developing in an environment where they are comfortable not owning their own information, and even worse…’ Well, I support you when you talk about information that exposes students’ personal and confidential information, however, when it comes to putting scholarly ideas on-line I have no problem with that because I believe in the Death of the Author a concept which says no body owns ideas, once ideas are published ( eg. On-line) everyone is free to have different interpretations of those ideas.

By: Lisa’s Online Teaching Blog » Blog Archive » Web 2.0 and the Corporation

Fri, 01 Feb 2008 15:06:53 +0000

[...] Norman notes in his blog post about Facebook that students today seem inordinately comfortable sharing a lot of personal information wth big [...]

By: Lisa M Lane

Lisa M Lane — Wed, 30 Jan 2008 16:32:23 +0000

This discussion fit right in to a blog post I’m writing about advertising in web 2.0 apps, which I’d like to use to cobble together a CMS of sorts. I work for a public community college, and I’m put off by the ads. Advertising in apps is the “in your face” result of the “collect your data” practiced by Google and Facebook. Your data is collected so they can advertise to you, and that’s easier to do if they legally “own” it. Do I lose ownership of my home address when I put it into a web form to order something? I wonder now. I”ve thought for years that most of my efforts to “limit” the amount of information about me online are likely futile. I keep doing it just to make me feel better.

I cancelled my Facebook account, not because I had D’arcy’s deep understanding of the technology, but because 24 hours later I suddenly had an attack on my hosted server, which began sending out spam. This forced me to stop hosting Moodle because it could not longer email my students; my host claimed I was suddenly exceeding my limit on emails per day. Since I had done nothing else new, I figured there was a connection.

D’arcy, while I appreciate your focus on databases and storage, I’m not sure I care whether a big company says they are not storing my information, or that my email will not be published (thanks, Wordpress) — it is simply not in their interest to protect my privacy at any level. As an economic historian, I know better.

By: Cindyu

Cindyu — Mon, 28 Jan 2008 02:18:53 +0000

Hey D’arcy,

Thanks for the discussion - something many of us have been thinking about (and talking about) for a while. You may be interested in Pew’s study of American internet users (random sample of 2400). Sadly, their findings support your observations: “Fully 60% of internet users say they are not worried about how much information is available about them online. Similarly, the majority of online adults (61%) do not feel compelled to limit the amount of information that can be found about them online.” http://www.pewinternet.org/PPF/r/229/report_display.asp

Lots of discussion here at UBC about how to approach this on the education front.

By: Sami

Sami — Sun, 20 Jan 2008 03:36:49 +0000

@Aron: I think we got off on the wrong foot. Sorry about that.

By: Aron

Aron — Sun, 20 Jan 2008 03:04:54 +0000

Sami: I will continue to avoid attacking you personally in spite of your insistence on this form of argument.

Filtering out ad hominem, I respect your efforts to form a project that resolves your privacy concerns and if you conceived of something that could compete with Facebook’s offerings while taking a firm stance on user privacy, I’d consider jumping on board.

I think you perhaps place too little emphasis on the importance of connecting with friends and “seeing a few pictures of them now and then”.

I’m going to end my contribution to this discussion right here. All the best.