Most blogs start out as hobbies, they act as a place for a person to deliver their musings and ideas to the world. In most cases people leave comments or link to your posts if they agree (or disagree) with you. The MDLU has been to me nothing but a hobby, a place for me to post pictures, discuss technology, law, or criminal justice issues, or basically just give my two cents on the world around us.
When social media made it big, we all rushed to try the latest and greatest in online networking. Some flocked to MySpace, some flocked to friendster, and others went to facebook. Yes, some went to twitter (but it came along later). Facebook served as a place where family and friends could share information and not fear as if their information was going to be "released in the wild." The privacy settings in the beginning were pretty solid. But as the need for Facebook to make money grew, the users privacy slowly eroded.
During the first facebook privacy change my friends (including myself) rushed to update our settings. However in the process we lost the tough security for the new "improved" security (notice, improved is in quotes. Yes, you can add your own air quotation marks). I spent hours going through the settings again just to make sure they were close to what I had. Just when we think it's safe to get back into the water, Facebook thinks it is a good idea to share what are friends are reading on the websites that we visit. There have been plenty of times while visiting CNN, Huffington Post, and Pandora where my friends have been staring back at me when all I want to do is just read the news or listen to music for the day. If I want to see what my friends are reading I'll have them tell me or e-mail it to me.
Facebook keeps pushing the privacy line to the very edge. Just recently if you had a filled out profile, your jobs, schools, and interest were changed from links to pages, with the information from those pages now clogging up your newsfeed (with your friends being updated on what schools you've added to your profile). I have yet to see this change occur on my page, but I have noticed it on the profiles of others.
If staying on top of the privacy game is a challenge for a tech savvy guy like me, I'm afraid for the millions of users who lack even the basic knowledge of the Facebook privacy settings. It is due to the fact that Facebook does not notify its users of the pending changes or allow users the option to retain their old privacy settings that I will not add the "Like" button to the posts here on The MDLU. If you want to like my post do it inside whatever remains of the walled garden that is Facbook, but you'll never see the button here.
