The Facebook Timeline is creepy as hell
benwerd.com
benwerd.com
Those drunken photos, random pissed-off status update, smattering of professional news, and "Lost a loved one" updates followed by a photostream of your grandmother's funeral form a stilted caricature of your actual life and persona.
That's why, when I want to share something significant, I do it in a form suitable for the purpose, hopefully in a way that is beneficial to the reader, and contributory to the internet, world, etc. if what I'm sharing is significant enough.
Perhaps to wit, my memorialization of my grandfather, who I saw decline and pass away this year: http://cemerick.com/2011/04/05/opa/
That is all to say, if you want to control how you are represented, don't turn over your identity to a third party.
I love the new profile, and love the idea of timeline. I have wished for some time that I can easily go back in time and see what I posted 6 months ago, a year ago, 2 years ago..,. my life was so different then. Can't wait for this to be active.
If you add people as Facebook friends who you think "it would be creepy" if they know things about you from a year ago, that's your fault. You're using it wrong.
I put my friends into lists long ago, and don't share anything with people I only met once or twice. Facebook, keep going! This is awesome!
They do this now...
In a way one could argue that allowing targeting of ads so tightly, using personal data, is commercial gain through that personal data. Not sure I'd personally push it that far though.
I come to, and comment on, this site because I believe it is filled largely with people of an above-average sophistication when it comes to these kinds of issues. Don't make me reconsider with this kind of inanity.
If you can't make the statement for legal reasons then say that. If you can't make the statement for other reasons say that. If you don't want to comment officially then say that. I don't think it's that inane - either they (you) do sell data or don't; just strikes me that if you can't make such a statement officially then you're not likely in a position to really know if it's true or not.
TBH I'd just assumed that FB do sell such data, to know that they don't sell any personal data (as I indicated) is a big result IMO and one that I don't feel I've seen championed. Pretty much I assume any website with a large subscriber base sells such data unless they explicitly tell me they don't; even then I'm rarely convinced.
What is creepy, and perhaps more depressing than anything, is the idea of a Facebook timeline actually passing for the story of your life. When used to the extent pitched at F8, it becomes Cliff's Notes for a human relationship – instead of having known someone for seven years, you can just read their timeline and call it catching up.
I suppose a lot of people don't see this as a bad thing. I can't help but see it as a gradual cheapening and trivialization of the human experience.
There has always been criticism of new communications systems and claims that they will destroy normal human relationships. Things may change slightly, but in a free and democratic society you always have the option of going your own way. And unless your views are completely esoteric, there will be others who do the same. If your "friends" are happy with catching up by reading your Facebook profile, would you really get anything out of talking to them in the first place?
One group of people who automatically share everything they do on the internet and write status updates for every emotion or thought the have.
The other group of people a mysterious, silent, black hole to the advertisers and others who seek to profit from knowing our activities.
The other part is the autosharing, which I've discussed in another comment.
Taken separately, I think either part is notably creepy, but put together, they cross waaaaaay over my personal creepiness line.
Think about this conversation for a moment::
Dick: I sure do hate strawberries. They're gross!
Jane: OMG, you are so crazy. Strawberries are delicious!
Dick & Jane: LOL (literally, they have a laugh)
In this conversation, neither Dick nor Jane are upset or confused by the other's feelings about strawberries. There is little ambiguity to the fact that the adjective "gross" applies only to Dick's feelings about strawberries. Neither feels threatened by the other's feelings about strawberries, because neither of them have any significant emotional investment in the fruit, and their relationship won't suffer as a result.
Step back and look at the Facebook Timeline situation. The author finds it creepy. "It", is the act of inviting others in to your life experiences on such an intimate level. "Creepy" is how the author feels when considering doing so on his own Facebook account.
Some people, when they read the conversation about strawberries above will have a visceral reaction about Dick's dislike of strawberries. "How can anyone dislike strawberries," they'll exclaim!? The same thing is happening here with the Facebook Timeline conversation. For some people, the Facbook Timeline is like inviting a complete stranger in to the bathroom with you, and not a bathroom with stalls and dividers. I'm talking one toilet here. Then again, maybe you're in to that kind of thing. I'm not here to judge.
The point is that in any sizable population, you're going to have divergent viewpoints on what is "creepy" and what is not. Creepy is not an objective measurement. It's how you feel about something. What I don't understand is the author's framing of the issue:
"Nobody’s forced to use Facebook, of course, although for many it’s pretty much a mandatory part of the social experience. What worries me is the trend of radical transparency and social context throughout the web software industry, where it’s expected that everyone will share their lives unless they’ve got something to hide. On the surface, for white males like me living in California, there’s a lot to be said for this on an individual level; don’t lie, be up-front, wear your intentions and motivations on your sleeve. But ultimately the decision about what to share has to be the individual’s – if you don’t feel like sharing something, don’t. Radically transparent interfaces are designed in a way that leads to a kind of peer pressure for disclosure: everyone else is sharing information about A, B and C, so why are you being so evasive?"
To paraphrase, "I recognize that I'm not forced to use Facebook, but I'm worried about the impending pressure to share." Taken further, one could say that the author is concerned about the "implications" of this. Implications is code for something else though. It's a rhetorical device used to represent a growing dissonance between the author's feelings on a subject and the perceived consensus.
Over the past few years, this has dramatically changed; now I'm friends with coworkers, parents, etc. As my list of friends/target audience changed, the posts I made shifted in nature to stay appropriate to my current list of friends at the time that I posted any piece of content. When Facebook enabled post-specific privacy controls, I made lists and used them religiously for restricting access to content I provided.
However, short of clicking through each and every one of my old posts and changing the access control list or removing the content/untagging myself, how do I prevent the next boss or coworker that I friend on Facebook next week/month/year from easily seeing the dumb shit that I was posting back in 07 when my target audience was other college kids?
What I really wish existed was a privacy setting that allows me to restrict people from viewing content that existed before our Facebook friendship began. If I posted something before I knew you, and before I could account for you being a part of my social stream, it's none of your damn business.
That, right there, is why this is so terrifying. Regardless of stalkers and people who browse your past for kicks, this is an insane utility for profiling individuals down to the minutiae of every day life. What's more is that it's a catalog, itemized down to the hour of activity on your Facebook. Yes, this has been available in theory for awhile, but now it's highly accessible and easy to find and scrutinize any moment in anyone's life (that is, if they've been posting to their Facebook). The scary part: a lot of people do.
The geek in me wants to applaud Facebook for the technical achievement of the whole thing, but deep down, this just feels a bit too much like opt-in surveillance (whether that be by the government or individuals).
The barrier to entry to browse a user's past appears to be: a Facebook account.
[1]: http://cl.ly/ANI0 [2]: http://cl.ly/AMpv
Impressed because it's an elegant way to deal with a problem that didn't exist until recently...how to make old user info useful and re-relevant. Until they had so many multi-year users there was no need to revisit old data.
Uneasy because I've seen this before. Essentially, they've created a version of the Officer/Enlisted Record Brief (ie - US Army personnel dossier). Surely, there's nothing wrong with creating a consistent, repeatable format for understanding people and their experiences. It saves time and reduces effort required to pass judgment. In two specific ways, though, I found dossiers inadequate undesirable:
(1) A record brief never accurately captured the skills and experiences of the person being considered. A life is so vast (and variable!) that it can't possibly be captured in a proscribed format. I guess this abuts my general unease with FB as a whole. I felt that I would never be able to capture myself through my profile/pics/etc and didn't want to be judged by a poor facsimile. Status updates and the increased ability to interact with friends and family tempered this unease. Now they've gone a step further towards formalizing a life's structure.
(2) The ouputs could drive the inputs. Because FB inevitably has to be selective on what can be recorded in any type of dossier (standardization being the key), FBer behavior might be modified to match those fields. Army dossiers drive Army people to focus on activities and experiences that look impressive on the dossier (awards, deployments, schools). FB Timeline is an order of magnitude removed, but if it catches on and becomes the de facto way that users are judged by family/friends/employers, the possibility of driving user behavior certainly exists.
Yes, I know that FB is voluntary.
When I post something on facebook, there's a personal context of who I'm friends with at the time. Three years ago, I was a different person. I was friends with different people. And I've never before had the access to old data.
Now, I (and others) are able to browse those posts in a different context from when they were posted. It's a pretty radical shift. For example, I've grown more and more guarded about posting things like "this job sucks" or something. But I used to do it years ago, because it was much more private than it is now.
Now others can go back and see my posts. It's opt-out instead of opt-in on my part. It's very different, and it's unclear to me what the ramification are. Might be bad, might be good.
Like everything else: "we'll see".
I'm not entirely sure what you mean by "now" here, but this isn't a recent change - for as long as I can remember, Facebook has let you see past posts by your friends. If anything, the Timeline feature limits the visibility of past posts, because, if I understand it, it lets you choose what stuff is emphasized on your timeline.
Perhaps I'm overlooking something though. I'd love to know if this is the case.
An obviously better way to do it is to auto-share into a private queue that you can then go through and approve for sharing into specific lists/circles. Maybe that's a bit too fiddly, though, and probably too cognitively expensive. I suppose it also creates an update bunching effect, where your updates come in bursts instead of a steady stream.
Either way, passive auto-sharing just seems like it makes embarassing situations too easy.
It also sometimes seems to me like Facebook is actively and deliberately trying to make human communication/interaction as reductive as possible.
[Edit: I think there's another angle to this that's kind of quietly subversive in a pervasive way: If auto-sharing of your various web activity is on by default, then you might have some low-level filter on your actions, because you're always a little bit afraid that everyone can see what you're doing. We all start to behave as if we're living in a pan-panopticon (everyone is watching everyone else).]
[0]: http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/read_in_facebook_social...
If not, apologies, it's hard to keep track.
However that was not the case when we just started using it years ago. Back than, many people saw FB posts as something private shareable only with a tight circle of friends. Now these old posts will be coming back into the light for all to see.
Great line - "On one level, it’s brilliant. On another, it’s undeniably, pervasively creepy, to a level we’ve hitherto been prepared for in human society."
Given that, how is this a problem?
And still, you can group friends into lists and share selectively. Just like Circles in Google+.
I understand though that many (most? - given the comments under Facebook-related stories) people are not so OK with that.
I don't think your mis-use of Facebook is their fault at all.
My solution to this problem is just to post anything questionable or private to Facebook at all; it's a much more comprehensive solution than hemming and hawing over friend requests.
For me, it's the "now" part. The Facebook management can decide to make that information available to others, openly or behind the scenes, if they deem it to be in their financial interest.
Sure, maybe they won't. I just don't like voluntarily building such a collection of information and leaving its fate so completely in the hands of others.
However, I do know several regular Facebook users that do indeed view this sort of thing as too much, and (for the moment, at least) they are reconsidering whether they want to continue being users.
I'm pretty sure 20 years old and less people really don't care about their timeline privacy and if they do, they can easily change that.
People that "care" about those issues are 25+ tech people, my mom do not care, and teens in my family reallly do not care
the new facebook features prove that facebook is really moving forward in the 'social' space and are succeeding. Google+ a threat? I don't think so, maybe for the old facebook, but not this.. I can already see all new moms going crazy about that timeline feature.
It's boring to see so much articles about how bad 'privacy' is, how creepy facebook is and etc. Seriously anyone can see that.. there is privacy if you look for it, if you don't it simply to assume that you want your profile public..
People without experience to see why they should care don't know to, but that doesn't mean they won't be affected.
I didn't care about preparing my business for a recession when I first started it because I hadn't had to manage through one. I do now.
Tech people who understand data care because they know the ramifications younger, less tech-savvy people don't.
People aren't just crying wolf. Thinking about alternatives creates huge opportunities. Wikipedia and Linux came out of people foreseeing the limitations of proprietary software.
Who knows what awesome social media alternatives might come from people foreseeing the limitations of social media based on centralized servers?
Edit: This is a serious question.
Here's the form for friends:
https://www.facebook.com/help/contact.php?show_form=deceased
Is the data of a past life still worth something to them? Will they spend the money to keep it? I bet that anthropologists and sociologists would love to get their hands on historical data.
Also, I suppose the data of a famous person might be worth a lot in 50 years, like the publishing of a president's diary.
I can see it now "See the hidden facebook messages of Lady Gaga"
To make a meaningful negative statement about Timeline or any new technology, you need to argue that it hurts human society on some measurable level. This is not impossible to do, but its much harder than saying "That creeps me out".
I just don't trust the company and I don't trust Zuckerberg.
I actually enjoyed going through the timeline on my own, reliving some of the memories, and for personal use I think having the timeline available will be really neat to check every couple years or so, but beyond that, I don't know if I want to manage my 'current' image actively enough to keep it open or not.
Anyway, this is good impetus for rethinking publication settings of some of my not-yet-embarrassing photo albums.
Facebook is what you make of it. Just as I choose to almost never view my 'News Feed,' I'll similarly opt out wherever possible from using these new timeline features.
later not happy people can see it
uhhh