Can’t use facebook, ergo can’t compare, but, well, sounds daft t’me, if you don’t want people to know stuff about you online, don’t do it with an account attached to your namem seems easy enough to me.

While that is good advice, Mat, that’s not even really the problem here. It’s not as if this is information that is publicly available to any old person. You can choose to have your Facebook profile visible to friends only. Those settings did not change when mini-feed and news feed were introduced.

To me, this is the most exasperating thing about this whole hoo-ha. If you were worried about private information getting into the wrong hands, why on earth would you add said wrong hands to your friends list?!

Then again, apparently the new tracking system on LJ, which is completely innocuous and dead useful for chatty journals, is a gross abuse that encourages stalking, according to some deluded reactions. One of them thinks it’s akin to Orwell FFS.

Can’t use facebook, ergo can’t compare, but, well, sounds daft t’me, if you don’t want people to know stuff about you online, don’t do it with an account attached to your namem seems easy enough to me.

Facebook shouldn’t have expected that revolt. It is, after all, designed to be a social network — yet its users have shown themselves to be massively anti-social by asking for privacy from their so-called “friends”!

To choose a quick example, I might know that you have a dog. I might also know that you are looking for a vet. If I know both these things, then I also know that your dog is probably ill.

To go for something more Facebook oriented, I might have just broken up with my girlfriend. I might also have just posted a kinda flirty message on someone else’s message board soon after. If you know both these things, you might reasonably infer that I fancy this other person, or even that I broke up with my gf to pursue this other person.

Bringing data together creates new data. Sure it was possible to do this data-merging by hand, but that’s done on an individual basis, rather than a broadcast basis. Additionally, these data links might have got lost in the overall torrent of other data in the system. Example: there’s a difference between me meeting a friend in a park, for example, where other people *might* see me, and the details of that meeting being sent via email to all of my friends.

It’s this new data, that was previously private (or at least relatively private) that is what is so objectionable. Bringing the data together with the news feed is an active act of creating the data and so is an active act of privacy invasion.

I hope it’s not changed, because I think the new main page perfectly encapsulates what a social site is about – keeping in contact with your, well, contacts!