Either I am more creeped out by people getting all personal about things all the time and following me around, or maybe people just get more personal and creepy like that with ladies.
I don't think so. I have been harassed and followed around on Digg by a couple of assholes who definitely were not under the impression that I was a lady. They were under the impression that I was OMG!AMOOZLIM!! though, which I guess makes it okay. Anyway, that is one major reason I don't do political discussions under my real name. There are definitely assholes out there who would follow you around IRL if they got the chance.
Sometimes I use the same name in different places, sometimes not. I don't frequent many forums on a regular basis. I don't care so much about staying gender neutral because I don't think I go anywhere where gender matters all that much.
I don't tell anyone IRL specific stuff about where I hang out online, I don't feel comfortable with the idea of people I know being able to follow me, even though I'm pretty much the same person (probably more scattered IRL, though). Is that weird?
I keep my professional persona completely separate from everything else. But everything else has become less and less compartmentalized over time. When my older son became a professional musician, I had to make a decision about whether to continue to scrupulously compartmentalize my online and real-life personas. I chose to stop compartmentalizing.
And facebook has pretty much obliterated any barriers I used to maintain among my online and real-life non-professional friends. Now all the band geeks and Latin club nerds I went to high school with interact with all the assholes I know online. Add in the punk rockers who friend me because of my son's band, and the result is Mormon elders, pagan high priestesses, folks with enough metallic body modifications to give the airport security hardware nervous breakdowns, fundie atheists, and assorted teabaggers (who used to be cool, I tells ya!) rub elbows on my facebook wall regularly.
What I find super-hilarious is how nicely the G+ discussion threads linked illustrate the problem. It's basically a bunch of middle-class first-world white guys saying, HEY I DO NOT HAVE A PROBLEM WITH IT LOL and others chiming in to say LOL ME TOO.
Here are some people talking about why the real name policy is a bad idea:
I know about the Google+ arguing because I follow Robert Scoble and he linked to this story. I kind of like g+ (more than Fb anyway) but if the policy doesn't change I'll probably lose interest. I don't have a lot of time for that stuff right now anyway.
Ha ha, good thing we have this thrad, because I already bamped the Facebook one today.
He says some weird things about the history of the "web," but that's because he's like twelve. Plus the thing where he says it's somehow OK that he's requiring Facebook accounts for his new service.
The rest is p. good, though, and totally on topic for THIS thrad.
Non-spoilery comments:
The trick is that for it to work, you have to explicitly give it access to all your stuff, so it's not just the stuff that your friends or the public can see, unlike that previous thing they did with the API that I'm sure we posted about here but that was forever ago and I forget.
Spoilery comments:
I thought it was deliciously creepy. I started with the headphones in, but took them out after the first couple startle noises, because I don't like that cheap shit. I had to lol at what it did with the pictures, because a lot of my pictures I'm wearing some kind of mask or costume and it looks kind of silly with him creeping on Leela. Also, the fantasy was broken by the fact that it kept picking pictures of me with my big, bald motherfucker of a husband. Like, I'm aware that I have the privilege of being blase about my privacy because I have a secure home in a decent neighborhood with dogs and big men.
What really got to me was his constantly looking the camera in the eye. Creep on pictures of me all you want, I don't care, but please do not stare down my soul.
Anyway, if you go all the way to the end, don't wait for the 59-minute countdown. I didn't check, but I heard-tell nothing happens.
So, supposedly, it was just a viral marketing thingie for some production company or who knows what, for funsies, but now it's being reposted around as a "watch out for facebook creepers!" thing, so that's what I'm doing.
He says some weird things about the history of the "web," but that's because he's like twelve. Plus the thing where he says it's somehow OK that he's requiring Facebook accounts for his new service.
That part was strange. He just spent the better part of his talk putting down Facebook for their policies, and then goes on to say that Facebook accounts are required for registration on his website.
I like his ideas in theory--in abstraction. I'm not as sure how they would work in practice. I can see the upside, if people are honest about it.
I was watching a LinkedIn webinar about how to use LinkedIn for different things, including how to get a job. One of the questions was, what do you do when you have vastly different jobs you're seeking. She gave the example of a lawyer and a yoga teacher. People want to be open to as many possibilities as possible. The person leading the webinar gave the advice that you have to pick one. It's possible to have two vastly different careers on a profile, but the possibility (in her opinion) of getting job leads in either area is reduced by putting both of them on the same profile. Of course, it would be different if you're already doing one or the other.
I was thinking about how, with more work being done over the internet, that it may be possible to have different profiles with different handles (nicknames) to have both those careers, as long as one or the other were possible over the internet. I was just at a website that taught meditation strictly over the internet, for instance. In the example at the LinkedIn webinar, that person might seek a job as a lawyer with a LinkedIn profile with their real name and then create a handle to also have a job as a yoga instructor over the internet, or even IRL.
For those who missed it, this company Path got busted for downloading users' contacts from their phones without their knowledge. They say they did delete the contacts after they got caught, but the most disturbing aspect to me is that, as with other scraping techniques, it's third parties' information being handed over. So the doublemasses saying, "IF U DUIN WANT YORE STUFF PUBLIC, DO NOT PUT IT ON THE INTORNET" are, well, doublemasses. You just have to be careful not to give your contact information to anyone who might intentionally or accidentally use a scraper, I guess.
I learned something important today. lisarea is a girl. I read your name as listeria and assumed you were a gay guy shacked up in hippyland with some ACLU lawyer and an adopted asian kid.
I'm so creeping on you now.
__________________
Build a man a fire and he'll be warm for the night. Light a man on fire and he'll be warm the rest of his life.
I'm hating the Facebook ubiquity right now. All these damned sites want me to use Facebook to log in and it's pissing me off. Newspapers, satellite radio, bookstores, god-knows-what else, want me to log in through Facebook before perusing their web sites or leaving comments or--for Gawd's sake--purchasing something from them.
So far I have been able to resist since it's no temptation. But dammit!!!
And look! The word itself made an appearance three times right here! In this post!
(Yes, this post would have fit the RANT THREAD just as well. But here I get to refrain from using swears.)
I'm hating the Facebook ubiquity right now. All these damned sites want me to use Facebook to log in and it's pissing me off. Newspapers, satellite radio, bookstores, god-knows-what else, want me to log in through Facebook before perusing their web sites or leaving comments or--for Gawd's sake--purchasing something from them.
So far I have been able to resist since it's no temptation. But dammit!!!
And look! The word itself made an appearance three times right here! In this post!
(Yes, this post would have fit the RANT THREAD just as well. But here I get to refrain from using swears.)
It won't be long and you'll need a F***book account to check into a hotel. We'll resist it like my older parents resisted a credit card. They only got one when they needed it to travel in 2003 because airlines and hotels no longer took checks. I think they have it in a sock drawer for emergencies; like the prepaid cellphone they keep in the glove compartment of their car.
Next thing you know they'll get a PC and eventually the internet.
If they can only hold out for another couple of years, there may be someone out there who could feed us the blue pills.
__________________
Build a man a fire and he'll be warm for the night. Light a man on fire and he'll be warm the rest of his life.
Thank you for the nightmare fuel. Me and my uterus are thoroughly freaked out.
I have totally been receiving those. It is a side effect of having seven friends all get knocked up in a year buying gifts for them as well as stuff to help them through their pregnancy. I thought I was crazy for thinking all this marketing was coming to my door telling me I am going to have a babby.
So the Target philosophy towards expecting parents is similar to the first date philosophy? Even if you’ve fully stalked the person on Facebook and Google beforehand, pretend like you know less than you do so as not to creep the person out.
How are the aggregate sites, like Spokeo, getting info? They show a bunch of social sites I don't belong to at all, and some that I do. Is it just a list of all social networks or what exactly?
I just renewed my DNR and bought the proxy service because I didn't have it before because of stupid
Sorry, lisarea, but I don't see any reason to be even slightly perturbed in the facts behind this story.
If I buy certain stuff in quantities that only a subset of the population needs, then the shopkeeper who serves me is likely (and entitled, I think) to make the connection and place me provisionally in that subset. The alarmist spin being applied here seems to depend on the spurious notion that a retailer knew a secret that a father didn't know, and the rather ludicrous judgement that something is wrong when that happens.
Spurious, because a guess, however well-informed, is not secret knowledge. And ludicrous, because fathers don't have a right to be the first to know all their daughters' secrets.
Spurious, because a guess, however well-informed, is not secret knowledge. And ludicrous, because fathers don't have a right to be the first to know all their daughters' secrets.
No, that's not the issue, although you do touch on it. It's the daughter's secret, and stores are employing elaborate datamining techniques and predictive models to discover information about people's private lives. Target isn't just a gossipy shopkeeper. It's a giant corporation employing teams of analysts to troll vasts swaths of data for indicators of private information, including private medical information, about people who shop in their stores; and they're using that information to make assumptions about people.
In fact, a while ago, I had a really weird thing happen to me. I started getting brochures and gigantic postcards and stuff from a local hospital (that I've never been to) about organ prolapse. I suspect it has something to do with another person whose information is conflated with mine as a result of some sloppy work, but maybe it's just because of the astonishing volume of buttsex supplies I'm always buying or something. For whatever reason, though, this hospital intimated to my mailman that I threw a sleeve or something.
So I guess I could try to casually bring up the fact that I have no prolapsed organs to my mailman, but what if I actually did? Why would that be anyone's business but my own and my doctor's?
Most people pay for things with credit or debit cards, so retailers have an astonishing amount of information about people's personal lives, and it's currently being used for a huge variety of purposes, potentially including credit rating and insurance scoring; and there has been pretty much nothing done in the US to legally limit how datamining companies, retailers, and other corporations use that information, or to control them for accuracy. What if my health insurance company decided to raise my rates because they think I have a prolapse? What if my homeowners' insurance had data that said that people with prolapse were more likely to file claims, or if a credit reporting agency decided to lower my score based on some correlation? What if an employment check revealed, accurately or not, that a candidate for a job was either currently pregnant or likely to become pregnant soon?
Things like that happen all the time already, and the individuals being reported on aren't even told about it or given any means to correct or dispute information being reported on them. These things are all problems.