[Air-l] Facebook protests

Andrea Forte aforte at cc.gatech.edu
Thu Sep 7 03:12:37 PDT 2006


>
> 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




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