Blog, by Shannon » Facebook

How to protect your privacy on Facebook…

Shannon — Tue, 27 Apr 2010 18:25:07 +0000

I was a latecomer to Facebook. I just joined the service a little less than a year ago. At first, it was great being able to keep up with far-flung cousins and old high school friends, with no effort whatsoever. I eagerly checked in several times a day.

But after a month or so, my Facebook usage waned. All the Farmville and quiz status updates were annoying. I started getting weird spam and friend invites from people I didn’t remember knowing. To tell you the truth, I just felt more comfortable on Twitter.

Now I hardly ever visit Facebook at all, but I still update it now and then. It really is the only way I can stay in touch online with a large group of people. Mostly I share information about my kid or photos of him from TotSpot. I never visit pages anymore, or play games, or take quizzes. I stay off Facebook as much as possible.

Given this week’s news, I’m glad I’ve limited my exposure. Facebook is now trying to integrate itself with the web at large, and it needs our data to do it. It wants us to “like” things on partner sites. Our “like” data will probably be sold to marketers, who will turn around and try to sell us more things. I don’t know about you, but I am fed up with people trying to sell me stuff all the time.

I will stay on Facebook, just because it is the most convenient way to keep in touch with some people. But I will use the site even less now. I have tried to make my settings as private as possible. Here’s what I did.

All of these settings are available under the Account tab (upper right corner). Click “Privacy Settings.”

I clicked on Personal Information and Posts and changed each option to Only Friends can see, except for my bio.
I clicked on Contact Information and made sure my phone numbers and email address were visible only to friends or only to me. I also made sure Only Friends could send me a message.
I clicked on Friends, Tags and Connections and set everything to Only Friends. Except for Photos and Videos of Me — I set this to Only Me so no one will see any potentially embarrassing photos of me tagged with my name.
I clicked on Applications and Websites and then What Your Friends Can Share About You and unchecked every box.
Also under Applications and Websites, I changed Activity on Applications and Games Dashboards to Only Friends.
Also under Applications and Websites, I unchecked the box to join the new Instant Personalization Pilot Program, which shares your “like” data with other companies.

Finally, under the Account tab, I selected “Application Settings.” In the Show menu (top right, above the applications list), I selected “Authorized.” This shows every application and website you’ve authorized to see your Facebook data. I deleted every application or website I didn’t recognize or know I don’t use.

I did not edit my employer, school or interest pages, because I considered them fairly innocuous or so broad as to be useless to marketers. But this may be a concern for some, especially people with unpopular political views or unusual hobbies. There’s a lot of good information about how to protect yourself in this post.

How to Restore Your Privacy on Facebook (Gawker)

Filed under: Questions Tagged: Facebook, How to, Privacy

Should you expect privacy from online services?

Shannon — Sat, 13 Feb 2010 10:55:56 +0000

I think the answer is no, with some qualifications, which I’ll get to shortly. But here’s the thing. When you sign up for free services like Google‘s various offerings, Twitter, Facebook, free blogging platforms and a myriad of other services online, your value to those companies is in the data and content you produce. It is not in their interest to keep that data private. If privacy is important to you, then it is up to you — and only you — to safeguard it.

The only way you can guarantee online privacy is to avoid free services, including all social networks, altogether. But you need an email account, for instance. Well, there are many alternatives to the free email services. Your ISP, who you are paying to provide Internet service to you, will probably give you one. Or you can pay for an email account with a hosting company. The point is, when you pay for a service, then you have a right to expect a higher level of privacy, as agreed upon between you and the company. (Many people use a free email account for public transactions, like online purchases, and keep a private email account for, well, private communications.)

If you do decide to get a free email account or sign up with a social network, then you should accept right off the bat that you will be giving up some privacy. That is the deal with the devil you make in exchange for free access to these networks. You will no longer have total control over information about you and that you generate. It is best to know this and accept this from the start.

Personally, I like the openness that social networks have brought. I think it fosters communication, collaboration, sharing and understanding of our differences, but that is the idealist in me. Yes, there is a negative side, but that is true of anything with value. I think social networks help us express who we are, and feel okay with who we are.

But if you are going to use these services, and privacy is of some importance to you, then you need to become savvy about how they work. When you sign up for a service, you need to be willing to explore, play with settings, try things and see what happens, and learn what the service is doing and why. This means extra work, but as I said, it is not in these companies’ interest to protect your privacy, so you can’t expect it of them. It only took me five minutes of playing with Google Buzz to figure out that my followers were listed on my public profile and to turn that off. That was well before all the privacy warnings came out.

I have some sympathy for people whose email contacts were exposed by Buzz, because this was not an expected outcome. But only to a point. Because you had to participate in that exposure. You had to set up a free Gmail account. You had to turn on Buzz. You had to create a public Google Profile. You had to accept the list of followers/following presented to you by Buzz without making any changes to remove those who were not acceptable to you. At each point, you could stop and ask yourself what the privacy implications of this are. At the very least, you could wait a few days for the issues to surface. It was only a few hours before many news outlets on the web were posting about Buzz’s privacy issues and the fixes for them.

I think this is a good learning moment for all of us. By all means, play in the social networking playground. But remember that these free services still have a cost. Just like in the real world, online the only one you can count on to take care of yourself is you.

Google’s response to the privacy concerns and instructions for protecting your privacy when using Buzz. And Google may offer Buzz independently from Gmail.

Critics Say Google Invades Privacy With New Service (nytimes.com)
Are contacts friends? Google tweaks social hub Buzz over privacy concerns (taragana.com)
Facebook CEO Zuckerberg causes stir over privacy (macworld.com)

Filed under: Questions Tagged: Buzz, Facebook, Google Buzz, Privacy, Social networks, Technology

Is he died?

Shannon — Fri, 12 Feb 2010 17:40:31 +0000

I’m loving it that my childhood friends the Muppets have made a full comeback on the Web and are funnier than ever. Here’s the latest:

More Muppets YouTube goodness. On Twitter. On Facebook. On Sesame Street (don’t ever forget where you came from). And of course, their website. (Website? That’s so 2008.)

Filed under: Vidlets Tagged: Facebook, Muppets, Sesame Street, Twitter, YouTube

New features/look for Google Reader, StumbleUpon, Facebook

Shannon — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 17:34:55 +0000

The thing about people who write software is: They’ve always gotta fiddle with it. I used to manage a software development team, so I know what I’m talking about. Those guys aren’t happy unless they’re fiddling. You just got to hope that the fiddling turns out to be an actual improvement. It’s a crapshoot.

Now when millions of people use your software and you’ve still gotta fiddle, well, you’re going to upset some (or many) of your users. I’ve noticed that three websites I use frequently have been mightily fiddled with recently.

First up is Google Reader. First, they introduced a “like” button (a la Facebook) on articles and some additional sharing features, including making it easier to follow people’s shared items. Now they’ve added a Popular Items section, moved the Recommendations for new blogs to the left sidebar (called Recommended Sources) and added a new sort for articles: Sort by Magic.

I actually like most of the changes here. The Google Reader interface still works pretty much as it always has, with just a few new geegaws, so it hasn’t slowed down my browsing any. I magically found some cool people to follow, and the Popular Items section is a great way to kill a dull Sunday afternoon looking at cute pics, fails and funny cartoons without actually having to subscribe to any of those bourgeois feeds. I turned on “sort by magic,” and to tell the truth, I don’t notice any difference in the sort order, but I love the name. My grade: A.

Facebook’s changes aren’t nearly so intuitive. They’ve instituted two feeds, a Live Feed, which shows all your friends’ status updates, and a News Feed, which is supposedly the most interesting items from the past day. I find them both equally murky, and now I’m always vaguely suspicious that I’m missing something.

I was pretty much over Facebook, anyway. My friend calls it a “very clever Rolodex,” and that’s how I’ve started to treat it, only visiting when I get a message or need to look someone up. For day-to-day status updates, I get much more value out of Twitter. My grade on the Facebook changes: C-.

Quick tip: You can restore Facebook to (more or less) its old look. On your Home page, in the top left corner, drag Status Updates to the top of the nav bar and then click on it (you may have to click on the tiny “More” to show the Status Updates option).

Finally, I’ve been using StumbleUpon for a very long time as an archive of links I’ve liked, and I think I have 1,400+ links stored there. I also use Delicious for active research and projects, but StumbleUpon is more of an archive of old links for me. And the redesign has me baffled. I can never tell what interface is going to appear when I click “Stumble It.” I don’t know whether I’ll get the option to assign categories or write a review or if the stumble will even work. It’s all way too confusing and basically makes me want to abandon the site altogether. My grade: F.

If there’s one thing we can count on, it’s that everything will change, whether we like it or not. And if there’s a software developer involved, the changes will be frequent, random and usually come without warning. We might as well get used to it.

Posted in Reviews Tagged: Facebook, Google Reader, New features, StumbleUpon

Getting active (politically) using social media

Shannon — Thu, 27 Aug 2009 17:54:02 +0000

Ok, it may not be as impactful or as meaningful as marching on Washington or staging a sit-in, but if you’re using social media anyway, there are lots of ways to use it to make your political views known or to try to do some good in the world. Futurismic calls it “micro-volunteering”: using social media tools to do some good on your down time. Mashable is running a program called the Summer of Social Good, using social networking tools to raise money for worthwhile causes.

Here are some causes I like that you might want to join:

Advocate that the U.S. government more broadly support Open Source technologies.
Free your cell phone from the restrictive policies and outrageous fees of wireless companies.
Tweet your Senator to let him/her know that you support healthcare reform.
Use Twitter, Facebook and blogs to organize a boycott, like this boycott on Whole Foods in response to their CEO’s editorial against healthcare reform.
Other causes on Facebook.

Once you’ve picked your cause, head over to Twibbon to display a ribbon proudly on your Twitter avatar.

Posted in Exercises Tagged: Boycotts, Causes, Cell phones, Facebook, Getting active, Healthcare reform, Open Source, Twibbon, Twitter

Judgment, judgment, everywhere

Shannon — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 13:36:56 +0000

We live in a very judgmental culture. This shouldn’t come as much of a surprise, considering our Puritan roots. But with the advent of the Web, and particularly blogging, I have noticed a lot of judging and reacting going on. Bloggers post about how their personal choices are judged by others; commenters jump in with their own judgments. It seems endless.

Just in the past few months, I have seen blog posts complaining about being judged on all of the following decisions:

not to have children
to have only one child
to have many children
to work and put children in daycare
to stay at home with the children
mothers using their children’s photos for the profile pictures on Facebook (one of the sillier examples)
to eat a vegetarian diet
to eat organic foods
to eat local foods
to eat at McDonald’s
not to own a television
to watch television
to watch particular television shows

And it goes on and on.

I think there are two underlying reasons for so much judgment. One is personal: The judger is insecure about their own personal choices, so when yours are in opposition, they see that — often erroneously — as a judgment by you on them. For instance, if you declare that you don’t own a TV, those people who do own a TV and feel bad about how much television they watch might see your statement as an indictment on what they do. Even if you never intended it that way.

The other reason is societal. Judgment is a very effective means of getting people to adhere to societal norms. Deviance is punished by public shame, with the intention of avoiding oh-so-scary change. Turn on any morning news show or cable news network and you will see a lot of judgment going on, for this very reason.

You can’t change the judgers. It’s futile to even try. I have found a much more effective means of dealing with them: Cultivate blissful ignorance. Simply ignore the snide comment or disapproving glance that may or may not have been sent your way. Soon enough, you’ll stop seeing them altogether. Have confidence in your choices, and discount the opinions of everyone else, except those of your nearest and dearest, the people in your circle whom you really trust. It doesn’t really matter what strangers think. And you’ll be much happier if you just don’t care.

Posted in Asides Tagged: Facebook, Judgment, McDonald's

The multiple identity “problem” in Facebook

Shannon — Thu, 21 May 2009 13:27:33 +0000

So this past weekend I joined Facebook. I already have 60+ friends, which is approximately 50 more friends than I have in the so-called real world. My Facebook friends are a weird mix of family, friends, colleagues and people I haven’t seen since high school or college.

Yesterday our local radio show “The State of Things” devoted an entire hour to Facebook. Which means that we both are officially way behind the times.

One issue that was discussed was the problem of juggling multiple identities on Facebook when friends from all your different “worlds” — like work, school, hanging out, family, even your mom — come together and can see your status updates. How do you keep all of your personas straight?

I think this is a non-problem. One of the goals of life should be to discover who we are and then try to live as authentically as we can. At least, this is one of the goals of my life. That doesn’t mean that we don’t grow and change over time. I am certainly not the same person I was in high school, and I am thankful for that.

What it does mean is that if you’re struggling to present one persona to the people you work with and another to your afterwork friends and another to your family, then something is off. In one or more spheres of your life, you are not being true to yourself.

I am not saying that we should reveal 100% of who we are on Facebook or any other social networking site. Facebook is a public forum, so baring your soul there would be no more appropriate than it would at a conference or a cocktail party. What I am saying is that we should just be who we are, at all times, no matter who we are interacting with. I have generally found that most people like and respect this, and those that don’t — probably I don’t want to be interacting with them after all. Besides, it’s a lot less exhausting to just be yourself rather than trying to be what everyone else expects you to be.

And then you don’t really have to worry about who is reading your status updates.

Posted in Asides Tagged: Facebook, Multiple identities

My social media world

Shannon — Mon, 18 May 2009 14:49:41 +0000

This past weekend I joined Facebook, and now my social media world is so complex and intertwined that it makes my head hurt. To help me make sense of it all, I drew this map:

My social media map

(I used bubbl.us, which is a really intuitive, easy-to-use, free mind-mapping tool.)

This doesn’t show all my social media sites, just the ones I use most regularly. But it did help me organize my social media efforts, at least in my own head. The black lines show everything that feeds into FriendFeed, which is my nexus and the most complete view of what I’m doing online. The gray lines show which services are being automagically updated by which other services, usually via an RSS feed or FriendFeed’s automatic output to Twitter.

I organized my social media universe into four quadrants. My home quadrant (tan) — my blogs but also my Google Profile – are my home bases on the Web and also where the world finds me. My networks quadrant (green) have organized quite naturally into a professional network that I use only occasionally (LinkedIn), a network of friends and family I know in real life (Facebook) and an online network with many overlaps with the other two networks that I use most frequently and is the largest (Twitter).

My links quadrant (purple) are my tools for collecting and sharing links. I read blog posts and other articles via RSS feed in Google Reader every day, and share interesting finds out to my network. Delicious is where I permanently store links and do research. StumbleUpon is more of a historical record of links I’ve blogged about, plus a lot of random fun stuff I discover while surfing the web.

Finally, there are miscellaneous tools that reflect my hobbies in the pink quadrant. I’m an avid reader, so I have several tools for organizing and recording my reading and books (LibraryThing, Lists of Bests, All Consuming), which feed back to my books blog and sometimes Twitter. I also use tools to track my goals (43 Things) and travel (43 Places), and to upload my photos (Flickr).

Of course, not everything is on here. I didn’t include really miscellaneous places like my Amazon Wishlist or Bookmooch, or places I rarely visit like Digg or Technorati. But it is nice being able to visualize my little online universe and my place within it.

Posted in Asides Tagged: 43 Things, All Consuming, Blogs, BookMooch, Bubbl.us, Delicious, Digg, Facebook, Flickr, FriendFeed, Google Profile, Google Reader, LibraryThing, LinkedIn, Lists, Places, Social media, StumbleUpon, Technorati, Twitter

What are blogs? And how can we use them? Resources list

Shannon — Mon, 17 Dec 2007 20:54:06 +0000

This is a list of resources I have collected to supplement a presentation I’m giving at work on the subjects: what are blogs, how can our nonprofit blog effectively, and what is Web 2.0 anyway? These resources include many of the examples in the actual presentation as well as supplementary reading materials.

View the presentation

About Web 2.0

The Machine is Us/ing Us — a video explanation of Web 2.0
Best Practices in Using Web 2.0 in Nonprofits – a wiki explaining Web 2.0 tools and how to use them
Guide to Social Media – a wiki specifically for nonprofits wanting to understand and use social media tools
NetSquared – a TechSoup project supporting responsible adoption of social media tools by nonprofits
Resource Sheet: Organizational Blogs – a long collection of resources about organizational/nonprofit blogging

Blogging Tools

Nonprofit Blogs

Blogs About Nonprofits Using Web 2.0 Technologies

The Blogosphere (finding blogs of interest)

Technorati — Find tagged content on all blogs
Global Voices Online — Aggregates content from blogs from non-Western locations
Nonprofit Blog Exchange – Aggregates content specifically from nonprofit blogs and about nonprofits that blog

Into Web 2.0

Tumblr – microblogging site
Twitter – microblogging site that integrates with text messaging and instant messaging (IM)
del.icio.us – Tag, organize and share bookmarks
Stumble Upon – review and rate web content
Digg – read and vote on web content
NGO Post – read and vote on web content discussing social welfare initiatives
Flickr – share, view and comment on photos
YouTube – share, view and comment on videos
SlideShare – share, view and comment on presentations
Wikipedia – world-famous collaboratively written encyclopedia built with a wiki
Wikibooks – collection of collaboratively written textbooks written using wikis
Facebook – well-known social networking site originally focusing on college students
LinkedIn – professional networking site
Dogster – social networking site for dogs
Causes on Facebook – nonprofits using Facebook to promote causes and raise money
IntraHealth Informatics’ Flickr site – nonprofits can share interesting photos to generate interest

How can nonprofits effectively use social networks?

Shannon — Wed, 24 Oct 2007 21:00:01 +0000

I was asked to put together a list of resources about nonprofits using social networks like Facebook and MySpace, because some forward-thinking folks here are thinking of tapping into these resources. It seemed like a valuable list, one worth sharing, so here it is.

General Resources for Nonprofits Using Web 2.0

Resources for Nonprofits Using Facebook/MySpace

Examples of Nonprofit MySpace Sites

Essential Blogs to Read

The conversation on this subject is hot and heavy, and more are joining in everyday. It’s a good idea to keep up on what others are thinking and doing, and to join in the conversation. I’ve found the following blogs to be great resources for that.