Friendship

Wednesday, October 29th, 2008 | Celebration, Friendships, Relationships | Enter your password to view comments

Tags: Birthday, Birthday Wishes, Friendship, Love, Personal, Relationships

Saturday, September 27th, 2008 | Education, Facebook, Opinion, Rants | No Comments

Facebook is a platform that I use daily and I have become dependent on it over time – whether it be for event planning, reminding me its a friends’ birthday or whatever.

I have read many many articles on flaws of Facebook and the privacy lapse and other people feeling rather uneasy about using the platform. Still I continued using it and just ensuring that I remained on top of activity occurring on my profile (checking wall messages etc) and ensuring that my privacy settings is still intact.

Today I was really surprised to see how far Facebook is actually going with this “People You May Know” tool. I have included a screen shot below to explain. The “People You May Know” tool has now been developed to give other users even more information about you than before. In the past it never included the grey text section that reads “You and Sulaiman both live in Cape Town” but suggested your name and picture only. If your profile is set to be hidden, it would be hidden when the user clicked on your name. Knowing that there is now an even bigger risk of my information being leaked to others is really scaring me. . .

The People You May Know section on my Facebook Home Page

At the recent annual Facebook conference, Mark Zuckerberg the founder and CEO of Facebook, told an audience which consisted of 1 000 industry executives, software makers and the media, how the company’s features will run on affiliated sites outside its own. “Facebook’s mission … is to give people the power to share information in order to make the world more open and connected. By giving people the power to share, it makes it more transparent,” Zuckerberg told the audience. . .

. . . so how exactly is Facebook giving us the “power to share” when something like this creeps up on your home page one day without warning? Often I found that any changes to site are firstly implemented then days later I get to read about it on The Facebook Blog. Whatever happened to opting into a new feature before it is implemented?

. . . giving me the “power to share information” should include the option to add a feed to my own blog page – this could include my status updates and notifications – the sharing should be two fold to be “more transparent” so why can I only import?

Screenshot: My Basic Information Settings Page on Facebook

As you can see, my Privacy Settings do not allow people not currently on my Friend List to see my Basic Information (and this includes Location/Hometown). I find myself wondering if this Sulaiman person allows their Basic Information to be viewed by everyone on Facebook? I surely hope that no unauthorised person out there is seeing my location!!! Yes your location is a petty thing if you live in Cape Town but I will remind you of the open letter to the Facebook community from Mark Zuckerberg back in September 2006.

In his letter he was apologising for the sudden unwelcome feature, providing new privacy options, but ultimately defending the feature and his belief in free information flow. In his letter he included that his vision was “to create an environment where people could share whatever information they wanted, but also have control over whom they shared that information with.

…BUT at the same time it is hilarious to think that in Cape Town we have a population of around 3.5 million people, yet Facebook seems to think that I might just know that person? (Population Statistics courtesy of Wikipedia). Facebook is the second most popular browsed site here in South Africa which happens to also be is one of the top five countries actively using Facebook, don’t you think that we just too busy on FACEBOOK the internet to get to know the public also? LOL

On a serious note though, just because the two of us are from Cape Town Africa does not mean that we share the same kraal ¹. Given the recent rumors that Facebook will be opening up shop in Cape Town, one would have thought they would have done just a little bit of research into the city’s population before deciding to use “which city you from” as an indicator to link how people know one another . . .

¹ kraal

(krôl, kräl)n. South African