Facebook
Facebook allows you to search for friends by plugging in their email address. Email addresses that aren’t registered with facebook will get email messages telling them that So and So has invited them to Facebook. If you’re already on Facebook, you can link your accounts.

There’s one hitch – you can’t look at the person’s profile without logging into facebook, and if you search for them, well, odds are you’ll get a good couple hundred of results. So here’s the scenario:

1. I have multiple email addresses.
2. I don’t know immediately who this person is, but I can’t view their profile to confirm one way or another
3. Facebook keeps sending me reminders that this person has friended me on their site.
4. I can’t stop this email from sending without blocking all future emails (from people I may in fact want to be friends with for sure).

Now, I don’t arbitrarily have multiple email addresses. I have multiple email addresses for an excellent reason, namely that I use them on different sites and they help me preserve my anonymity. My facebook profile is public in one sense, but I don’t want to link it to say, an old forum account where I was a site administrator for a few years. While all of these profiles are public, they aren’t all tied to me.

What pisses me off is that Facebook doesn’t allow for the possibility of someone wanting to keep their online identities separate. Facebook is arrogant enough to try and force me to connect all of them. I don’t have any desire to do that. I can’t identify who’s trying to friend me on that email, but it doesn’t really matter – I’m pretty sure I don’t want to be friends with that person. Still, there’s no way for me to contact them outside of Facebook, and Facebook won’t let the subject drop and stop emailing me about it.

If I block the Facebook notification emails, I block all emails of that variety, even from people I might know and care about and want to reach out to on my existing account.

Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you, Facebook.

kyo:

me: don’t be that guy

kyo: not in those words

me: doesn’t matter

kyo: it’s just a little warning in the footer

me: out of curiosity, does the old version if IE give you a security warning when you click the link to go to the new version? because if it does, i suspect it’s become self-aware and afraid of its own mortality
“nooooooooo fred! I thought we were frieeeeeends”

kyo: it does not. do you really think it’s that much of a problem? i think we should at least try to convince people to switch, plus this layout is impossible to get to work in IE6 (it works, that’s an exaggeration – but there’s no transparency)

me: there are two kinds of people in the world;  people who understand that IE is not the only browser out there and people who do not

kyo: it’s not like I’m doing this on every one of my layouts.

me: the people in the first set (aka your target audience on this issue) don’t know that there are any other kinds of browsers, and they haven’t upgraded their version. do the math, dude. do you think they’re a) going to even notice the footer text much less b) take your advice?

kyo: no i don’t, but if someone bitches to me about how there is no transparency, i will point to that warning

me: that’s just it, THEY HAVEN’T SEEN THE INTERNET OF MODERN DAY

kyo: i don’t think I will change anything

me: THEIR INTERNET IS STILL FROM OLDEN TIMES!

kyo: but I want to try anyway

me: it’s all sepia tone and people in pictures all wear funny hats and high waisted pants. listen, you watch porn on old versions of IE and just see how cranky you wind up. “that young lady showed her ankles!”

kyo: lol

me: “ankle peekers II”

There are two sides to the personal privacy issue. One is that most companies, programmers, organizations, et al, figure that if the same data is available anyway, aggregated in a different format, it’s fair game. In other words, if I can take the time to hunt down all the information about someone in a time consuming way, how is it any different if a web site aggregates that data for me in one easy-to access format. The logic being that if the data was already out there, it’s no different in a new format. In one universe, that’s true, but in our universe it just isn’t.

The thing that worries me is that most people address issues this way, without second thought to how people might react, or more importantly, how it may jeopardize the private information and make it more likely for personal information to become compromised.

Are there legitimate uses for this data? Sure. But the bottom line remains that in our society, identity theft is by and large a crime of convenience. When data is made easily accessible, or, conversely, when doing a bit of work can get you a lot of personal information (e.g. debit card skimmers), it becomes not only feasible for malicious individuals to harm people, but it makes it very, very tempting.

When people had to dig up data the old fashioned way, by visiting government offices and sifting through paper work (or waiting for someone else to do it), it made data mining inconvenient and expensive in terms of time spent. It was not an efficient or effective way of stealing. It was, however, effective for people with more legitimate interests, who likely were interested only in a small amount of data pertaining to their individual interests.

With new technology comes a new way of thinking about things, especially privacy. What distresses me as an IT professional as well as a person with shit to lose, is how little these issues are considered. I have no problem being the voice of reason. I’ll continue to bring up this issue. It just scares me when I’m the only one who considers it.