When you really get down to it, high school is about relationships with the opposite sex, both intimate and friendly.
Not quite true for everybody.
The truth is that the plethora of information Facebook knows about you is unfathomable.
That's the crux of the matter right there — nobody normal realizes every click, every website visit, every posted word, every posted picture, every mobile refresh, and every contact in your auto-stolen address book betrays you.
For most people, the betrayal doesn't matter. The local barista/actor doesn't want to understand thousand-dimensional data analyses and what that portends for their future. Mainly, because it doesn't matter for them. Who does it matter for though? Future important people? Assembling massive future corporate blackmail material? Thoughtcrime? Crime by association? Or does none of this matter at all and it's just people bitching about bad dinners, good vacations, and showing unlimited baby pictures?
There's nothing new to be said to us about the evil of Facebook/Google, but normals have no idea how deep the rabbit hole goes.
I think this point rings especially true, especially in the light of recent events at PyCon. Social media has vast power to build or ruin reputations, and having all your private information on facebook can give you a larger surface area to attack.
This has always interested me (well, maybe not always--I'm not that cutting edge :p).
I used to have Facebook but deleted it, because I didn't like the whole concept of people using your online persona against you. Yes, my profile is still in Facebook's database but at least it is no longer immediately searchable/accessible.
And what I'm getting at is I have some friends with anarchist tendencies. Two of them are computer scientists and they had/have no problems voicing their anarchist thoughts on Facebook.
The other person was in the (German) languages field and she would never talk about it nor post anything related to it on her Facebook.
I still don't know where I stand because I travel to and from the US a lot, and feel if they associate me with anarchist stuff this may complicate matters when trying to cross the boarder.
For example, I was going to post a photoquote (I just made that up) with Thoreau and the statement "If the injustice has a spring, or a pulley, or a rope, or a crank, exclusively for itself, then perhaps you may consider whether the remedy will not be worse than the evil; but if it is of such a nature that it requires you to be the agent of injustice to another, then, I say, break the law."
But I decided not to. Hurrah for self-censorship, brought to you by the gov't.
>but normals have no idea how deep the rabbit hole goes.
Normals? Really? Yeesh.
Anyways "normals" care no more about how facebook works or what it does than they do about how Intel's chips work, Ford's engines, or NASA's Mars rover. How it works simply doesn't matter. There's no rabbit hole.
Not quite true for everybody.
The truth is that the plethora of information Facebook knows about you is unfathomable.
That's the crux of the matter right there — nobody normal realizes every click, every website visit, every posted word, every posted picture, every mobile refresh, and every contact in your auto-stolen address book betrays you.
For most people, the betrayal doesn't matter. The local barista/actor doesn't want to understand thousand-dimensional data analyses and what that portends for their future. Mainly, because it doesn't matter for them. Who does it matter for though? Future important people? Assembling massive future corporate blackmail material? Thoughtcrime? Crime by association? Or does none of this matter at all and it's just people bitching about bad dinners, good vacations, and showing unlimited baby pictures?
There's nothing new to be said to us about the evil of Facebook/Google, but normals have no idea how deep the rabbit hole goes.