Like a lot of commenters, my life is already all over the net. Whatever. The only thing that I share in Facebook that I don’t share elsewhere is my political allegiance. In my line of work, I don’t want to cloud the issue in Twitter or blogs (even my personal one). Occasionally my politics are reflected in posts and of course you can poke around in my groups. But if you ask me directly, I will tell you which party I support anyway. After a drink. You buy.

Anyway, I grew up in a small town where I was related to half the people anyway. I had less privacy living there than through anything I disclose in Facebook.

I’m staying too! RT @presleysylwia: Why I’m NOT quitting Facebook [link to post]

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RT @presleysylwia: Why I’m NOT quitting Facebook [link to post]

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RT @Sectorshare: Thinking of leaving Facebook? Reasons why you may not want to just yet by @davebriggs [link to post]

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Thinking of leaving Facebook? Reasons why you may not want to just yet by @davebriggs [link to post]

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Why I’m NOT quitting Facebook [link to post]

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I believe I saw something like this referenced as a “Silver Bullet” where organisations build a reliance on third party tech to a level that impacts them greatly should either something go wrong with said tech, or something happen that they feel they cannot include it in their business model any more.

I think Silver Bullets are unfortunately unavoidable, however, as people strive to implement new systems at reduced or zero budgets to meet the growing demands and expectations of their users. For example, at Lincoln we rely a lot on Google services such as Maps, Calendar and FeedBurner and services such as Yahoo Pipes. What were to happen if Google decided to charge for its services? Or changed its ToS to something that we as an organisation could not agree to? What if the notoriously flaky Pipes were to vanish? We need contingencies for these instances but, for many organistions, it’s simply too much of a quick win.

Sadly, I have to stay a member to keep up with just how dreadful it is.

The danger comes when an organisation moves from using FB as an additional channel for communicating with people to it being an exclusive one for some kinds of interactions. Want to join the discussion? You’ve got to be a FB member. That means encouraging/requiring people to agree to FB’s TOS that are highly injurious to personal privacy. That’s something that no reputable organisation should do.

The power of FB hold-outs and apostates is that they check the spread of this kind of behaviour. All power to them.

Anyway, I’m sticking with Facebook. I will admit that I’m not happy with the way that they constantly chop and change their privacy settings, sometimes to the detriment of levels previously set by users; I know what I’m doing in this field so I can keep on top of things like settings, but for other less educated users I can see how tweaking the vast forest of checkboxes can be a logistical nightmare.

For me Facebook is my walled garden (or at least as walled as I want it to be). When I first emerged onto the internet scene about five years ago, I kept a very public blog, talked about my family and what we were doing, uploaded photos of them to Flickr and suchlike. I never shared any personal inforamtion such as location, or other contact details, but as I kept on with this I became more and more uneasy. The internet is a powerful thing, for good or ill, and if you’re not careful on it you can come a cropper.

So when Facebook came along, I uprooted all of my personal content and focussed on Facebook as my primary means of sharing what my family is doing with a select group of people who would reasonably care. These are family members, old friends; anyone I’ve met in real life. My cardinal rule is – if I’ve not met them, I’m not happy adding them (although I do make exceptions). I still don’t put personal information on there such as my postal address or telephone number; only email.

I think that a lot of the issues here are media brouhaha and the perceptions of “entry level” users – this is reasonable however I do think that the sheer amount of options available does allow for a greater degree of customisation in your privacy. I think that as smartphones gain a greater market penetration, allowing people to always be connected to these networks (as I have for some time on my bog standard Nokia and now to a far greater depth on my Android) they become far more relevant and a valid third tier in our communication framework.

@davebriggs great post, particularly with you on 1 and 4

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