Facebook and that privacy thing

May 16th, 2010

My friend Cem has written a blog posting on how he’s trying to reduce his visibility on social networks. I haven’t been worrying about those things much because until now my “strategy” was to only publicize what I feel comfortable with making the rounds on the Internet. So if I comment on what’s wrong about the Taliban, Israel or the new Afghan government then it’s my right to do so and I feel comfortable about it. But the problem about information is that its meaning unlocks with the context it was publicized in. My statements taken out of context may easily be used to convey a picture of me that depicts me of either a Terrorist-hater, Terrorist-lover – or whatever else. While I don’t care about that much I do care about what I have control of.
Taking control is what this blog posting is about so please take a look at the evolution of privacy on Facebook and you will see a clear path that I would not describe as an evolution, but a degeneration. An evolution is considered as a development into something better but this is not what I see on that picture or on this picture. I can’t and I won’t take my blog offline as this is an area that I have full control of, but I will reduce my visibility on social networks, starting with Facebook. Weeks ago I have deleted some of my personal information there and I will consider taking the family pictures, although shared with family members only, offline as well. There’s just no more trust in Facebook.

In a second step I will be deleting some of my Facebook friends. Family members and people I have personally met will be on Facebook and business contacts will be on the Salam Business Club, LinkedIn and of course XING. I will stay in touch with the rest on Twitter or wherever else I have met them. This is in no way meant as a personal offense to the deleted friends but as a way to organize my presence on social networks and to share personal information only with those that I have a personal relationship with. Setting up visibility restrictions for every single message, picture and other pieces of information is not only cumbersome but due to the complexity inherent to Facebook literally impossible.

I hope you, ex-Facebook friend, understand my intentions and, again, don’t take this as an offense. In fact I recommend everyone to do the same thing. It’ll make you feel much better about Facebook and your privacy :-)

Salam Business Club is live!

December 31st, 2008

I’m proud to announce that the Salam Business Club has finally went live. Have a look at http://www.salambc.com and sign up for an account now.

Stumble upon… websites!

May 30th, 2007

After hearing and reading so much about it the past few months I decided to sign up for StumbleUpon.com. You have no idea what it is? Let’s see what Wikipedia says about it…

StumbleUpon is a web browser plugin that allows its users to discover and rate webpages, photos, videos, and news articles. These webpages are typically presented when the user — known within the community as a Stumbler — clicks the “Stumble!” button on the browser’s toolbar. StumbleUpon chooses which new webpage to display based on the user’s ratings of previous pages, ratings by his/her friends, and by the ratings of users with similar interests. i.e. it is a recommendation system which uses peer and social networking principles. […]

For me this has become one of the most fun tools lately and I discovered quite a few interesting websites by just stumbling upon them. Give it a try :-)

Java/Oracle related website: theserverside.de

January 7th, 2007

I’ve recently started filling theserverside.de (yep that’s mine!) with content. Any help is appreciated, so if you’re tech savvy and interested in filling theserverside.de with Java, JEE/J2EE and Oracle related content then drop me an e-mail. I’ll check out your skills (website or profile etc.) and provide you with decent access to the site :-)

Wanna-Be Hackers

February 20th, 2006

This is the “Top 5” of this month’s folders that people expected to find stuffed with lots of interesting (meaning: private) data when playing around with the URL of this website:

/privat
/mp3
/dokumente
/rias
/admin

There’s nothing exciting on this website’s subfolders for you to see so stop wasting your time and get a life :-)

Where Am I?

You are currently browsing the Technology category at .