I just wanted to make sure I had a record that this was a thing that actually happened.
For posterity’s sake
I just wanted to make sure I had a record that this was a thing that actually happened.
Librarians tried to save society, and failed
The other day I had a thought that so completely stunned me, that I just stood there with the shower water running down my face: librarians were so ahead of their time!
Librarians have been stalwart defenders of our information privacy before we even knew what information privacy or data mining was. Even in this digital age, libraries don’t keep records of what books you’ve checked out. This is not just poor record keeping, but a conscious effort to ensure people cannot use our own information against us. 70 years ago, librarians were already envisioning the case where someone could use the fact that you checked out a copy of Mein Kampf to blacklist you from getting a job.
Nowadays, companies like Google and Facebook keep track of every move we make online, correlating it, cross-referencing it, and (of course) selling it. If you search for a product, Amazon immediately sends you an email about similar products. Then it sends an email to your friends, who might also like products that you like. If you buy peanut butter, Yahoo puts you in touch with singles who have jelly. If you fart, Steve Ballmer bursts through your window with a can of deodorizer (the one that your best friend gave five stars on Yelp) (Yes, I know it doesn’t make any sense that your friend is rating fart deodorizer on Yelp, except that 1) your best friend is kind of crazy, and 2) this was the fart deodorizer sold by a special “beans only” restaurant. It’s downtown) (And by the way, that wasn’t exactly the craziest part of that sentence anyway, so lay off alright?).
We hardly exist as people anymore; we’re just chess pieces in the game of mass consumption. Our very existence generates money for other people. Every product we buy, every link we click on, ever celebrity we tweet about is stored in a database for later use. Employers are Googling job applicants and demanding access to their Facebook profiles before hiring them. All of a sudden, you’re wishing you hadn’t done that review of Mein Kampf on GoodReads.
And librarians saw the writing on the wall, tried to stop it, before it was even technically possible to do it.
Good job librarians. Sorry we didn’t listen to you before it was too late. Anything else you want to warn us about?
Google+ Extensions
Now that I’ve been using Google+ for a while, I’ve found the need for a few add-ins to make things work a little better. I should note that these are actually add-ins for Chrome, not directly for Google+, so they will only work for you if you use Chrome (and if you don’t, then I don’t have much sympathy for you anyway). I’ve been using these for a while now, and I will vouch for each of them.
Start G+ – This extension is essential! This one consolidates my Facebook and Twitter accounts with my G+ account. I can make a post in G+ and have it automatically go to Twitter and Facebook. I can see all three of my feeds in one stream. I don’t actually like having my Facebook stream combined with the other two, so I turned that option off. At this point it is still easier for me to view Facebook via Facebook, so that’s a personal choice for me. But I basically never used Twitter at all, and now I am, because it’s conveniently co-located with a service that I like. The downside is that people who follow me in more than one place have to deal with repeat messages, but I already had my blog going out to all of those places, so there was already a lot of overlap.
+PhotoZoom – When you hover over an image, it pops up full size. I thought this one sounded stupid, but everyone kept recommending it, so I tried it. It’s amazing! I’m so used to it now that I try doing it in Facebook all the time. Some examples of when I use it are: when I get a notification that someone changed their profile picture, the thumbnail is so tiny you usually can’t figure out what it is a picture of, but it’s not necessarily worth clicking on the image to see it bigger. By the same token, when someone puts up pictures, sometimes the thumbnails are good enough for most of the pictures, but you want to see one a little closer. So you can just mouse over it, and you don’t have to be taken out of the whole flow of your stream to see it.
Useability Boost for Google Plus – This is a really minor one, but it just tweaks the CSS a little bit of the G+ page. The main thing it does is change the background from white to gray, and add a little space in between posts. This might not sound like much, but it makes it so much easier to read. I tried turning it back off once, and I had to put it right back on.
+Comment – This was a way to collapse comments. When I went to get a link to where to download it, it seemed to be gone from the app store. Upton further review, it seems that it was not needed anymore, because Google+ folded that functionality into the base program. So, good on you Google. Looks like I can uninstall this one.
The one thing I’m really missing is something to automatically push my blog posts out to Google+. Right now it automatically goes to Twitter via WordPress and Facebook via Networked Blogs. But there doesn’t seem to be any equivalent yet to push things out to G+. So I am manually pasting the link in every day, which is kind of tedious.
Anybody know of anything to do this? Any other extensions you like?
Google+
I finally had some time to play around with Google+, the new social network from Google.
I was inclined to dislike Google+. Google got me twice recently with their over-hype of Google Wave and Google Buzz, both of which were awful. After those two debacles, I believe I was on record saying, “That’s two strikes Google!” Well, Google will be happy to know that they’re back in my good graces with this one.
Google+ is very, very similar to my preferred social network, Facebook, but it is, in fact, better. Although I am a Twitter user, I do not like their interface. I know there are plenty of twitter fans out there, but I’m not one of them. So Google+ has them beat by a mile in my book.
Basically, Google learned the lessons of those that have come before. Sleek, clean interface (sorry MySpace), and more-tightly integrated security over who can see what (sorry Facebook), while keeping all the good features, such as image tagging and “liking” a post (or +1 in Google+ lingo). And the best part so far? No annoying game messages! (sorry Farmville) We’ll see if that changes in the future. I have a bad feeling there’s no way to stop it.
The best part about Google+ in my opinion is the integrated concept of “circles”.
Basically, all of your friends are categorized into one or more circles, such as “friends”, “family”, “acquaintances”, or anything else your heart desires, such as “college friends” or “red-headed step-children”. Then, whenever you do anything on Google+, you decide which circles you’d like to do it in. For example, are you telling the entire world what you had for breakfast, or just your family? Are you sharing that picture with your co-workers, or just your close friends? Do you want to see the whole stream/newsfeed, or do you want to skip the updates of mere acquaintances?
I have been using the lists feature on Facebook for quite some time in this manner, and I love it, but it always sort of feels like a late-game add on. It is a bit more difficult to use and manage, not nearly so tightly integrated. Whenever I tell someone about it, they’re always surprised to hear it exists. And really, I think it more closely represents the way we *want* to use a social network. There are some things we want to share with some people, and not others. We need the ability to sort through the overwhelming amount of information and read the updates we care about.
So, +1 to you Google+!
The problem, however, is that the thing that makes social networks social is, well, people to socialize with. Since most of the people I interact with are on Facebook, then I have to be on Facebook too. I can’t just up and switch over because I feel like it, abandoning my entire existing social network. And, although Google+ is better than Facebook, it is not *enough* better, that everybody is going to up and move. So, for the time being, I guess I’m stuck with two websites to check.
So, if you’re on Google+, you can find me here. And if you’re not, drop me a comment, and I’ll send you an invite.
The Internet is Forever
With all the talk lately about Facebook and the problems inherent in its privacy settings, I just wanted to put out a little safety warning in regards to the Internet.
Maybe Facebook could make their settings clearer and easier to use. But I think there isn’t too much Facebook can do about things, because I think the problem is that the people using Facebook are not educated about how their information is stored, used, etc. Before anybody is allowed to use Facebook (or Twitter, MySpace, etc. I don’t want to just pick on Facebook), someone should sit them down and say:
Facebook is still the Internet. Anything you say can be used against you. If you want something to remain private, then don’t post it on the Internet. Assume everything you write, any picture you upload, will be seen by the worst possible people (your boss, your mom, your parole officer, etc).
It’s really quite simple: if you want privacy, don’t go to the biggest public space in the known universe and share it. What would the guy you went on one date with do when faced with all of your Tweets from right after your last breakup? What about when your boss sees why you REALLY didn’t come in to work on Monday? Would your mother wash your mouth out with soap?
This is something that bloggers and other personal info sharers have known for some time. The problem is, the big social networking sites (like Facebook) make sharing things so easy, that people are doing it without considering what they are sharing, and with whom. I would wager that most of the people using Facebook have no idea how it can come back to haunt them.
Even if your information is relatively protected (i.e. you have your privacy settings set correctly), it is still being stored on a server somewhere, out of your control. Web crawlers can find information and replicate it to another site with no privacy controls. Someone could hack the server, or an employee could make an unauthorized copy. Or, a friend of yours could innocently re-post a picture or piece of information, without being malicious. Even just a little personal data could be dangerous in the wrong hands.
Okay, but you’ve heard all of this before, and probably ignored it. So I’m going to give you some concrete examples. As a person who puts large amounts of personal information out on the web, these are the issues that keep me awake at night.
The obvious examples are people looking for a job, or for a date. Do you think that interviewers or blind dates aren’t going to Google you? You would be amazed at the amount of information you can find about a person just by searching for them. For example, when I was in college there was a quote from me in the school paper. I was pretty frustrated at the time, but the article makes me sound like a racist. For the longest time, that was in the top 5 things that came up about me when you searched for my name, although now it has thankfully been pushed to about page 3 (mentioned at the risk of bumping that page up higher in the rankings). So any potential employer could Google me, say, “Whoa, racist!” and give me a pass without knowing anything else about me. And that article will be on the Internet in some form or another for the rest of my life.
You see why this is a problem? I certainly didn’t consider that when I gave the quote in the first place. Let me give another example. I was going to start with a new doctor who I had never seen before. For no reason at all, Sara and I googled him the night before my appointment and found his Facebook page. It turns out, the guy was right out of school (younger than me actually), and his page was full of pictures of him drinking. According to his page, he was known as the “party cougar”…I’m not sure what that means, but it was pretty clear that he did a lot of partying. Needless to say, I didn’t go into the appointment feeling very confident in his abilities. “But wait!” you say, “Isn’t that his fault for not having his privacy settings correct?” Well, it depends on how you look at it. On Facebook, at least by default, people in your same “network” can see at least some of your page. “Chicago” is a pretty big network.
This is just the tip of the iceberg. It gets much worse.
Little bits and information leak out over time, no matter how careful you are. As they used to say when I worked on classified materials, even unclassified information can become classified when it is linked together. And, because the Internet is forever, these leaks don’t disappear. They hang around. Little bits of trivia that seemed so stupid and unimportant are suddenly linked with other bits of information and start to give a picture. So let me give you some much scarier examples.
Lets say there is a person on the internet who is known only by their internet name, and someone wanted to find out where that person lived. If this person is active online, even if they think they are being careful, someone could probably do it. This person might have idle talk about things he passes on the way to work, or construction across the street, or the local independent music store he frequents. These comments might span years, but, taken altogether, one might be able to narrow his location down to a neighborhood. The person might use their first name here and there, and then have a family member known as Uncle Lastname. Given the person’s full name, or at least an educated guess, you could find out even more information about them, especially in public records such as house sales or building permits, which you could match with the neighborhood. Finally, the person might have a picture, lets say of their flowers on the back porch, in which you could see the view they see, including businesses or addresses, or at the least which floor they live on.
So that’s bad enough. But they could go further. Maybe you talk about going to see your favorite band in concert, the crazy things your cat does, or (god forbid) mention your mother’s maiden name. What happens if they go to your bank website, say they forgot their password, and the security question asks them about one of those things?
Okay, so let me outline my personal nightmare scenario for you (worse even than the above, in my opinion). In a couple of years, my daughter will be on the Internet. What’s to stop an online predator from convincing her he is a family friend? He’s got baby photos of her, he’s got all the information about her growing up; anecdotes of funny things she’s said, dates of vacations and surgeries, etc. How could he *not* be who he says? Shouldn’t she trust him?
::shudder:: I hate even thinking about it. And if I really wanted to be sure that it never happens, then the only thing I can do is close up shop. In fact, it’s probably already too late, because the second I typed my first post, it was picked up and cached somewhere, such as mirror sites, Google, or the Wayback Machine. And I can think of a lot more scenarios and ways to get information on people than I am mentioning, for fear of giving people ideas.
You can’t live in fear. And, in reality, there are actually very few online predators out there. So, even knowing all of this, I keep doing what I do. I’ve decided the benefits outweigh the risks. But please people, for the love of all that is holy, don’t go into it blind. Know what you are putting out there. Know how it can be used. Think about it before you put it out there. Don’t expect Facebook, or anybody else, to protect you. Protect yourself, or at the least, make informed decisions.
That is all.
Shane Halbach 