Gloria Y. Gadsden, an associate professor of sociology at East Stroudsburg University of Pennsylvania, was escorted off the campus on Wednesday because of jokes she had made on her Facebook page about wanting to kill students. Ms. Gadsden said the Facebook comments were a way of venting to family members and friends, who she mistakenly believed were the only ones who could view the postings.
On this episode of Spark: Online friendship, personal branding, and geoweb privacy.
“People thought what they had was an address book for an e-mail program, and Google decided to turn that into a friends list for a new social network,” said Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, an advocacy group in Washington. “E-mail is one of the few things that people understand to be private.”
Google retains information, and refuses to share data that could shed a bright light over how much the government and others potentially tread on online privacy.
Google has the chance to walk its talk, and set a standard — as it has so many times before — for the rest of the internet to follow.
If it doesn’t, shouldn’t the company think twice about trumpeting transparency, when it won’t come clean with its own users?
In a statement, the Electronic Frontier Foundation said: "These new 'privacy' changes are clearly intended to push Facebook users to publicly share even more information than before. "
Those who post on MySpace cannot assert invasion of privacy claims if their words are republished in a newspaper without consent.
Here’s how anonyblogging works: let’s say johndoe.tumblr.com is your target. You create a free account [...], then “follow” John’s blog. Obsessively “reblog” every post John makes, adding snarky, mean, or outright profane commentary. Tumblr’s “dashboard” system means that people [who] follow John will likely see the nasty comments. It’s the equivalent of watching someone shout at your pal as he walks down the street. But what makes the attack so unpleasant is that there’s no way for John to shake a malicious anonyblogger.
Swiss officials said Friday that they had sued Google to try to require it to tighten privacy safeguards on its Street View online service. It is the latest of a series of European objections to the company’s handling of personal information.
Media critic Ken Auletta tracks the development of Google from a search engine created in a garage in 1998 to the provider of all things Internet in his new book Googled: The End of the World As We Know It. He asks: "Do you trust Google? Do you want to store that information with a company? Will they guard your secrets, or will they share them with advertisers or with someone else?"
At one time (and I’m old enough to remember this), it seemed as if everyone feared the Internet’s scope and potency. It held powerful secrets, from Social Security numbers to conspiracy theories. And it’s still a reckless place, largely governed by schadenfreude (TMZ) or voyeurism (Fmylife). Meanwhile, Facebook is a non-anonymous (hence tightly controlled) fantasy land. While the Internet unmasks,
Facebook can gloss over, trading honesty for fake intimacy -- exhibitionism flirting with normal social restraint.
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Gloria Y. Gadsden, an associate professor of sociology at East Stroudsburg University of Pennsylvania, was escorted off the campus on Wednesday because of jokes she had made on her Facebook page about wanting to kill students. Ms. Gadsden said the Facebook comments were a way of venting to family members and friends, who she mistakenly believed were the only ones who could view the postings.
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