[Air-l] Facebook protests

[Mark Bell]

Good points Andrea but I keep going back to the fact that was no privacy in
the first place. If anyone is upset by the information on Facebook being
distributed it should not have been there in the first place.

The way I see it is this:

What a person put on Facebook is like things you put on their front lawn. a
person has no control over who drives by. They have little or no control
over how the city can change things to push more traffic past your house.
All they can really control is what is in your front lawn. None of the
information that Facebook is using is obtained without consent of the user.
The consent they give by making a profile and uploading information.

In terms of being retroactive it is the aggregation of the changes being
retroactive not the changes themselves. All of these changes were logged in
profiles already.

M


On 9/7/06, Andrea Forte <aforte at cc.gatech.edu> wrote:
>
>
> >
> > The changes definitely change personal information flow but they don't
> > affect privacy. It may affect "perceived" privacy but anything a student
> > puts up on Facebook has to be seen as no longer private.
>
> I've been thinking about this a lot myself, (as a Facebook user who is
> creeped out by the feeds! :-))
>
> Does privacy intersect with the ways that information is aggregated? Does
> it affect privacy if disparate pieces of information that were once
> difficult to find, assemble and understand are suddenly aggregated with
> descriptive icons and temporal information? I'd argue that this DOES
> affect privacy.
>
> Aside from that, the changes are retroactive, so activities that were
> performed under old expectations of use are now displayed in this new,
> aggregated form. This seems like a pretty egregious error when it comes to
> designing around users' expectations of privacy...
>
> Andrea
>
> _______________________________________________
> The air-l at listserv.aoir.org mailing list
> is provided by the Association of Internet Researchers http://aoir.org
> Subscribe, change options or unsubscribe at:
> http://listserv.aoir.org/listinfo.cgi/air-l-aoir.org
>
> Join the Association of Internet Researchers:
> http://www.aoir.org/
>



-- 
Mark Bell
MA student in Ball State University's Digital Storytelling program
http://www.storygeek.com
"The future is here...it's just not widely distributed." - Tim O'Reilly