Today is Quit Facebook Day, a day to encourage people to join the two Torontonians who started it to sever all Facebook ties. I wonder if anyone I know will drop off the face of the ‘book. Facebook has been getting a lot of flak about privacy controls, especially here in Canada, so the movement is topical. Milan recently removed any info from Facebook that he thought could be easily collected by bots (interesting idea, read it here).
I have three thoughts about this. One, I like Facebook. I like how easy it is to share and connect and organise. These are things that enrich my life, and Facebook is my chosen tool. Could I do this other ways? Probably. But this is the way I use.
Two, I know very little about what my privacy settings are right now, which probably means they’re low. And I should look into that. I know Facebook and its creator are not my buddy*, and I can’t trust them to have my best interests at heart, because they don’t. Only I do, and I need to be in charge of that.
Three, Facebook isn’t going anywhere, at least not yet. The next thing will inevitably come along, but for now, it’s a tool that anyone who works in anything communications-related needs to learn and use, along with Twitter and oh yeah, email.
Besides, isn’t quitting Facebook the new, cool, hipster thing to do, with new sites like Diaspora** popping up?
*Yikes, the Facebook story movie Social Media doesn’t exactly look complimentary to Facebook creator Mark Zuckerberg, does it? Aaron Sorkin-written, which means I will have to see it.
** "the privacy aware, personally controlled, do-it-all distributed open source social network."
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment