{"id":11461,"date":"2009-02-19T12:00:44","date_gmt":"2009-02-19T17:00:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/?p=11461"},"modified":"2009-02-19T16:34:21","modified_gmt":"2009-02-19T21:34:21","slug":"facebook-turns-five-and-a-question-of-privacy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/daily-astrology\/facebook-turns-five-and-a-question-of-privacy\/","title":{"rendered":"Facebook Turns Five, and a Question of Privacy"},"content":{"rendered":"

Dear Friend and Reader,<\/p>\n

While in Dublin over Christmas, I popped into the Lighthouse Cinema, a gorgeous new independent theater, to watch Etz Limon (Lemon Tree)<\/em>: a film about the Israel-Palestine conflict, shot through the perspective of two middle-aged women. In one scene, the wife of an Israeli politician divulged Palestinian sympathies to her best friend, who also happens to be a reporter. The next day, the wife\u0432\u0402\u2122s opinion was all over the news.<\/p>\n

\"An
An excerpt from Rachel Asher's Facebook page.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Living in the Internet age is like having a best friend who\u0432\u0402\u2122s a reporter, and if you are part of a social networking site like Facebook, your best friend really is<\/em> a reporter.<\/p>\n

Every photograph that\u0432\u0402\u2122s taken, every place you go with someone is a potential news headline in the life of you and those around you.<\/p>\n

On Feb. 15, news broke that Facebook made an attempt to hang onto your information<\/a> for itself by changing its terms of use agreement. The Consumerist, a blog whose parent company also publishes Consumer Report, broke the story<\/a>. Based on your privacy settings, Facebook has control over the information you publish on your page, and can reuse it whenever and however it sees fit, including articles that are posted as links from other websites. This would mean that Facebook has the right to reuse and manipulate this article you’re reading right now, because I posted it on my Facebook page.<\/p>\n

What changed in the new Terms of Service agreement was what happens when you delete your page: previously, your content went with it. In the new Terms, Facebook got to keep your info.\u0412\u00a0Eric has likened this to Ice-nine<\/a>, the chemical referenced in Kurt Vonnegut’s\u0412\u00a0Cat’s Cradle<\/em>.\u0412\u00a0Everything Ice-nine touched became Ice-nine, and everything Facebook hosts becomes Facebook.<\/p>\n

There was massive public outcry over this, and three days later\u0412\u00a0they went back to their old terms<\/a>\u0412\u00a0and claimed sloppy contract writing as the reason for this near-massive infringement on our privacy and ownership rights.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Some people, like me, don\u0432\u0402\u2122t mind if everyone knows they went out to a metal show last weekend because of a tagged photo that someone else uploaded (in Facebook, you can select and identify a person in a photograph). For others, this is the greatest invasion of privacy imaginable. It seems the only places off limits from comment are places you go to alone.<\/p>\n

On Tuesday, Eric posted a two-part article<\/a> from the archives on Chiron in Aquarius, where he described the feeling of alienation you get when sitting at a table of friends and realizing you don\u0432\u0402\u2122t have the same opinion as them. It can be a very lonely place.<\/p>\n

We live in a world of multiple communities, with multiple opportunities to judge and be judged: in truth, we always did, but the blur between them all is new. With the increased opportunity to find people who are like-minded, there is at least as great a chance that you’ll find people who disagree with or misunderstand you. Sure, look what happened to me with the Christian Science community over the last few months<\/a>. When you’re publicly or semi-publicly presenting yourself, you don’t always know who’s taking notes.<\/p>\n

Five years ago, before Facebook (which went public on Feb. 4, 2004), my girlfriend\u0432\u0402\u2122s brother, my best friend from high school\u0432\u0402\u2122s mother, my ex-boyfriend, and my Finnish friend from grad school would not be privy to the same information about me. Now they are, and they all saw a picture of me stuffing a forkful of food into my mouth at a birthday party last winter.<\/p>\n

The whole experience of fast-travelling and widespread personal biographies is both a blessing and a curse. It must be thrilling to have a newborn baby and send that picture out into the world further than you ever could before. It must be horrifying to find that hundreds have passed around a personal photograph of you in your birthday suit, meant for two eyes only.<\/p>\n

While we can bemoan the downfalls of progress, it\u0432\u0402\u2122s a fact that it\u0432\u0402\u2122s increasingly impossible to live a double-life these days. Your boss can Google you, potential partners can read your resume online, and the government can probably find all that and<\/em> the naked pictures. Steve Bergstein, Planet Waves\u0432\u0402\u2122 civil rights lawyer and Psychsound blogger, wrote an article this week on the erosion of the Fourth Amendment and the exclusionary rule<\/a>. This means it\u0432\u0402\u2122s even more likely that your personal data can be rifled through, legally.<\/p>\n

So what do we do with this information?<\/p>\n

There is the obvious reaction to be terrified, horrified, angered. And yes, it\u0432\u0402\u2122s natural to feel all these things about the erosion of the exclusionary rule.<\/p>\n

But as far as the rest of it goes, transparency can be a good thing for us. If it\u0432\u0402\u2122s harder to hide who we are, it should be easier to be open and honest. If we\u0432\u0402\u2122re all vulnerable, we should be more forgiving of people\u0432\u0402\u2122s idiosyncrasies and moments of humility. Consider it the chipping away of another Victorian era. The truth is out: we all go to the bathroom, eat, cry, meet people and occasionally photograph really badly. It\u0432\u0402\u2122s not the prettiest or neatest liberation, but I\u0432\u0402\u2122ll take what I can get.<\/p>\n

Yours & truly,<\/p>\n

Rachel Asher<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Dear Friend and Reader, While in Dublin over Christmas, I popped into the Lighthouse Cinema, a gorgeous new independent theater, to watch Etz Limon (Lemon Tree): a film about the Israel-Palestine conflict, shot through the perspective of two middle-aged women. In one scene, the wife of an Israeli politician divulged Palestinian sympathies to her best … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":17,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"generate_page_header":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[36,52,1074,1072,1073,1068,1069,117,170],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11461"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/17"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11461"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11461\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11461"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11461"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11461"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}