Facebook is a "heinous violation of your freedom and imposition on your private space". Would you care to elaborate?
Which of your freedom(s) is being violated? What of your private space is being imposed upon?
Which of your freedom(s) is being violated? What of your private space is being imposed upon?
In short, the freedom to be a private adult and not spend the rest of my life in a high school locker room.
Thats not a freedom, that is a choice. You can have a facebook account and never log in to it.
There may be other privacy concerns, but "freedom to be left alone" is not one of them.
In reality, I would have far more options; there's a long gradient of subtle ways to let him know to what extent he's my friend or not. Most of all, I would have the option to defer making any kind of statement, assuming he's not a nutcase who asked me "so are we really friends?" And that deferral -- plausible deniability -- is the first thing FB takes away. That's what I call the freedom to be left alone.
BTW @ the guy who called me a sociopath: Not all relationships are black and white. There's such a thing as being polite to someone at parties and still not wanting to know every detail of their life.
I'm starting to think people here are just overanalyzing.
Also, there is no "reject", there is only "ignore" (i.e., the person does not receive a "rejected" message, they'll just never get an "approved" message). And if someone doesn't respond to my friend request: who cares? It's just Facebook. It's not the be-all end-all social network manager; it's just a communication medium.
An analogy that I can think of in the real world similar to what you are saying is, when I go to the mall, I like a hassle free shopping. Which means, I don't like to be bothered by sales/stores clerk. When I am at Macy's it is just a matter of time when a store clerk walks up to me to find out if I am finding everything allright. Now I can go ahead and be rude to that person considering he/she is intruding, or fake to be nice to quickly move on.
The point is going to the mall was my decision and I chose to go, very aware of what the system has. You can't be bothered about what someone else thinks when you really don't care much about them. Ignoring a friend request is a valid option.
What's Buenos Aires like, Josh Strike?
Of course I have a public web presence. The point is, I control it. I run a few sites including a bitcoin casino. I have clients, friends, and people who use my code. I probably write 15-20 emails a day. Yet none of it through facebook. It's not mediated. There's no extraneous information, either for me or the other party. And what you know about me by googling me is, for the most part, what I want you to know.
Including my last name and where I live. "Strike" is a pseudonym, and I haven't lived in Buenos Aires for about five years. But that level of privacy isn't available on facebook.
But writing letters does the same thing, and I don't see people complaining about pen and paper.
It's a shame that FB privacy settings are confusing (and ever changing), but aside from that, why blame the communication medium for what you choose to say (or not say) with it.