I just don't get why people think social media sites care about them. Why would they? You're using the service for free, you're not paying for confidentiality; you assume it exists. Of course theyll take money to divulge information. The only conspiracy theory I would give some thought to the validity of is that Facebook shares user information with the CIA. Any why wouldnt they? It's a better citizenry database than the CIA could ever hope for, and people willingly add themselves to it!
Well, this thread is making me want to leave the internet forever. I don't know what is better, using basically the same password for everything so you remember it, or having all of your different passwords plugged into my iphone so you don't forget. I guess I will just continue on the hopes that nobody is really that interested enough to go snooping around my business.
You should use a password management service like Keepass or something if you can't remember passwords, and a good, strong, non-duplicated password to lock up your Keepass account. I have one password I use across all of the sites I don't care about. If Nett decides he wants my password here, he could also use it to log into my InStrength message board account. He could also pay my electric bill if he figured out my account number and what electric company I use - since the site doesn't retain my payment data, I don't consider it to be high risk. But he couldn't get at my Facebook, any site where I have administrative/moderator privileges, shopping sites like Amazon, email, bank, etc. Don't duplicate passwords across any account you care about. Heck, even my two bank accounts use different passwords.
I guess I am the only one here who could care less about my facebook account, hack away and look at all of my vacation pics as much as you would like. Hell, I am "friends" with my employer and didn't have to give it a second thought when the request came through on whether to accept or not. But I've immediately changed my password for my bank account. And if anybody important could track me down here, that I may have some concerns about.
Solaris, are you fucking retarded? Your post reads like you just got sucker punched in the dome by Mike Tyson. What is cue as obvious foreshadowing for $500, Alex? I know far too many people who post pictures of weed smoking on Facebook. Blows my mind that retards actually think what they post online is secure. Whether it's moral or not for companies to find/buy your personal information is irrelevant because they don't give a shit what you think. This semester for a Computers in Education course I had to run a program that gives your fb an appropriateness report card. It was a real wake up call that midget boxing and hooker disembowlment jokes on social media might have some serious ramifications.
It's not that simple, though. What if I figured out your Facebook password and started sending dirty messages to your boss? What if I sent a message to your husband, saying I couldn't remember my social security number, or I needed my bank account number for some paperwork? What if I used it to figure out where your 13 year old niece lives, send her some messages to find out where she's going to be next Friday night, tell her that a friend of the family is going to come pick her up? This kind of stuff isn't just about the security of your data. It's about the security of your identity.
It all comes down to trust. Most people trust that an email or fb message coming from an account that they know is a legitimate request or message. What if it's not? I'm not at all sayin people should not use fb or anything, I'm just advocating some healthy skepticism and "what if" thinking. And despite what your parents told you, most people don't care about what you post and won't go out of their way to hack your accounts. You may fall prey to a mass hack of credit card info, etc, but it's very unlikely you'll be targeted individually. Unless you do something to make yourself a target, like that moron Solaris did. Being a system admin has a lot of responsibility attached to it, and I take it seriously. I could care less about any of you, and have no desire to hack any of you. Again, it's about that trust thing. But start thinking about repercussions. Take a couple of seconds and think "what if" when you pick a password for your site. Or what email address you're using to sign up. Think about the other associations to them; what other accounts or passwords are using those, and what would be the fallout if one of them becomes compromised? Don't be paranoid, just don't be stupidly naive. Even a small effort can reap big rewards in that regard.
I'm not sure if this is still the case (I'm not a FB person), but doesn't FB's TOS state that all content posted on their site becomes the property of FB? If so, it would seem they could pretty much do whatever they wanted with the content, though I suspect that once it was revealed they were selling a user's content believed to private to one's employer, their user base would drop significantly. I don't trust most people, let alone corporations and have no expectation of privacy when I put something online. That's just one of the reasons I don't participate in those circles of social media. Throughout history, people have done stupid things and history has a tendency to repeat itself. Because of the technology available today, stupidity has a greater chance to be recorded and exposed to a wider audience and thus, the stupid become more accountable for their actions. The stupid just haven't figured this out yet. The dipshit lighting the shirt to set the squad car on fire? He should get an additional 10 years for stupidity, though I suspect if that were a crime, he'd already be sitting on death row.
I think this is another manifestation of a narcissistic society. The younger members of this world are more susceptible to egotistical thinking: that they are bullet proof, that the world revolves around them, and that their shit don't stink. Social media platforms like facebook, myspace, twitter, and blogs amplify this behavior. These platforms allow people to say anything that comes to their mind instantly, and makes them feel important. These platforms also give the feeling of security, even though we all know this is not the case for a great number of reasons. Of course a 17 year old kid who thinks everything he does is hilarious and amazing and feels safe in his online environment is going to post compromising pictures and statements. I think this is where parents need to step in. Of course, there are always people who are going to do stupid shit, regardless of their upbringing, but the current 1-25 year old generation was brought up being told that they are #1, awesome, fantastic, perfect, and loved. Being loved is important but being showered with undeserved praise and regularly given undeserved privileges leads to narcissistic behavior and outlook.
Whatever, dude. Do you really think everyone hasn't figured out that you and Solaris are the same person?
??? On reflection, Netdata is clearly quite right. Had he, or I suppose an admin of other boards I visit, wanted to he could probably managed to get into quite a lot of my internet accounts and that certainly is cause for concern. I've always taken internet security relatively lightly but the damage someone could do to my accounts could be devastating. All the blog posts, uploaded photo's, email contacts and messages could be deleted. I wonder if it would be possible to do that sort of thing for a profit, use peoples information for blackmail or threaten to lock them out of their accounts. I wonder why those Nigerians don't bother doing it instead of sending those stupid emails.
Maybe because they don't have the skill to do so? All a Nigerian needs is your email and your mind. The other requires some level of technical skill. You use what you have. With an internet connection, everybody and their momma can set up a decent phishing scam.
Moving beyond the topic of online security practices, I think the scariest aspect of social media is that you don't even have to participate to get potential caught up on its repercussions. As I said before, I don't use Facebook (or other social media). However my friends do. Suppose, like many people, I like to go out drinking with my friends and I get a little too drunk one night and make a fool of myself. My friends might decide I'm hilarious and take pictures of me and put it up on their Facebook accounts to share with my other friends who weren't there - Here are a bunch of pics of Trakiel acting like a drunken idiot! I never find out about it because again, I don't use facebook, until I get called into my boss's office one day and get fired for embarrassing the company because someone went snooping and saw those pics where it just so happens I went drinking right after work and didn't change out of my company uniform, which has my company's logo on the shirt. Obvioiusly, people who take pictures of themselves doing illegal shit or do illegal shit where they're likely to be recorded deserved to be punished for their stupidity. But I say you could make the argument that we are already living in a world where our every move is tracked like in Nineteen Eighty-Four, the only difference being that it's not Big Brother who's monitoring us, but we ourselves.
I just want to say that young children using some of social networks, like Facebook, is fucking retarded. I was facebook stalking my cousin and under his list of family, his nephew was listed. Who has a facebook account. This kid is 10 and looks 6. So, two questions: how can any adult think that this is a good idea (his mother and he are friended so it is obviously something she is aware of)? And why in the hell does he have an 100% OPEN profile? I know my cousins are from the stupid side of the family, but this just disappoints me.
I have some 'rules' for social media and professionalism. I don't always follow them - but I think they're reasonable and I probably should follow them. I actually think everyone should follow them unless they intend to live the kind of life where they are comfortable disclosing every detail to prospective employers as part of the interview process. 1. Never add current coworkers to any kind of social media network. Keep your current job segregated from your personal life at all costs. 2. Use a psuedonym online for anything that you wouldn't want to show a potential future employer. For safety sake, make that everything but facebook. 3. Have a facebook profile under your real name. Don't do anything interesting there. Everyone has onef, so it looks peculiar if you don't - but keep it as boring and standard as possible. Restrict everything to friends only and still never add current coworkers. And doing this lets your 'friends' tag your photos, which you can then un-tag and have some control. 4. Never connect your real name to your psuedonym. If your psuedonym is implausible, use a consistent pen name or something that sounds enough like a real name that you can give it out if you feel the need for something. 5. Always use a cut-out stage, forward email from your psuedonym account to your real name account and clean it up before forwarding that email to anyone who knows your real name. Etc. Have a layer of isolation between your life and your friends, and your professional identity. 6. Unless you control the office IT (by which I mean do the technical work on the proxy and network infrastructure) - never access your private identity (blog, email, whatever) from work unless it's through a smart phone that doesn't use the office network. Facial recognition software means that these steps aren't fool proof. But in 10+ years of working in IT, having coworkers and potential employers research the crap out of me trying to find gossip or dirt, the only things that have ever come out, have been the things I chose to disclose. I've had one coworker find the Scootah psuedonynm without me intending him too, when I fucked up and sent him an email from the wrong account. All of those rules are inconvenient and over the top. But I can't count the number of friends who've had major issues from not following them. Everyone likes to play detective and people are gossipy little bitches. Incidental details lead to major privacy failures when you have coworkers on facebook. Anyone with a remotely interesting life has shit they don't want coming up in Google when a potential employer searches for them. Geeks will spy on you when they're bored. Social media means managing that shit now. Welcome to the future. Facial recognition 'suggestions' on facebook are kind of neat, but I really hope people keep focusing on privacy no matter how cool the technology gets. Currently the implications are managable - but there's a lot of shit that someone like Google or Facebook could implement that would just destroy everyone's ability to have any kind of private life outside of their bedrooms. This is one of the reasons why I say have a facebook profile. Let your friends tag you, so you can untag the ones you don't like. Nobody goes past the first page of search results if the first page is boring. It's impossible to have any kind of interesting life and be invisible - so don't try. Just paint a bland picture so that the idle disinterested will only see what you want them to see.
In this thread: lots of people demonstrate that they refuse to learn from experience. For Christ's sake, someone on this very board had their occupation, specialty, boss' information, home phone number, mobile number, home address, and pictures of their house posted up for all to see. I copped this lesson to the face in early high school. I liked this girl, and we had started talking. We'd been to each others house a few times, and were beginning to be close. One day, I received a letter from this girl in my locker. It included things we'd talked about previously, and was in character, but in retrospect was far too legibly written and coherent for a 15 year old girl who thought she had magical powers - obvious foreshadowing. I responded in kind, and answered questions about my feelings fairly honestly. Consider: you are an awkward, socially isolated kid who has never kissed, or hell, even hugged a girl, and a girl bares her soul to you in a letter. What would your response have been? Yeah. Fuck. My response got scanned and hosted on the net with my full name in the metadata by a bunch of kids that didn't like me* and had bribed her. All through high school, and then Uni, and then my first and second jobs, on the first page of google results when you searched for my full name was this fucking letter I'd written when I was 14. I was 22 and just starting my first grown-up job, wearing my first suit and presenting to committees, when I came in to work one morning and found my boss had left a printed copy of my angsty teen ramblings on my desk. Good times. (Also yes, my boss was awesome. Same boss that put a photo on his desk of a totally random family just to fuck with me). Fortunately by that point I had come to terms with it and we had a laugh about it, but the experience stuck with me. Lessons learned: 1). Never, ever write down anything you don't want EVERYONE to see. Even if it isn't particularly scandalous, consider whether you want a potentially infinite number of guests sitting down to share your long, dark tea-time of the soul 2). On the net, you have 0 power to control your information. It's out there. Maybe not forever, (I just googled myself - no letter in the first 4 pages) but 8 years was a long time. Especially in high school. Unrelated to the topic, but for completeness' sake: 3). Any feelings you have can and will be used against you in the court of public opinion, and girls are evil, flighty creatures who will stomp on your heart for their own amusement. It took me a long, looong time to realize I was making an intuitive leap from 'this particular girl is an untrustworthy slattern' to 'all girls are untrustworthy slatterns', but that's adolescence for you - reasoning and critical thinking skills aren't at their peak. *edit: Holy shit. I just realized that a friend of mine ran into the guy behind this about 3 weeks ago, and I know where he lives and what he does for a living now. Would exacting some form of revenge 12 years later be pathetic or incredibly satisfying? Alt Focus: I have a friend who is a great guy 90% of the time, but 10% of the time will do incredibly vicious things (for what it's worth he is diagnosed as bipolar, but personal responsibility is paramount and he doesn't hide behind his 'condition'. He just acknowledges that he can be a major dick.) Anyway, he had a fight with a friend of his, an engaged girl who had recently cheated on her fiance. He waited till he knew she was asleep and her fiance was awake, then posted the details of the cheating on her facebook - something like "I'm surprised you can throw rocks through your glass walls, considering you had sex with X at Y's place on the 06/02/11". Some of this woman's genius friends were online, and instead of laughing it off or denying it, posted about 10 iterations of "Like omg, take this down right now, don't air private shit on FB". The engagement promptly imploded, with much namecalling and viciousness on all sides, all publicly posted to facebook. It was horribly fascinating. It is worth noting that your FB page can become a stage from which to address an audience of all your friends. If you have secrets you don't want shouted from that stage, be very careful who you allow to perform on it.