{"id":134,"date":"2007-11-04T19:31:31","date_gmt":"2007-11-04T09:31:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/Liako.Biz\/2007\/11\/facebooks-privacy-is-smart-on-technology-but-stupid-in-thought\/"},"modified":"2007-11-04T19:31:31","modified_gmt":"2007-11-04T09:31:31","slug":"facebooks-privacy-is-smart-on-technology-but-stupid-in-thought","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/eliasbizannes.com\/blog\/2007\/11\/facebooks-privacy-is-smart-on-technology-but-stupid-in-thought\/","title":{"rendered":"Facebook’s privacy is smart on technology but stupid in thought"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’ve had to neglect this blog because I have been insanely busy with work and my studies, and will continue to do so for the rest of the year. But I thought I’d post a quick observation I made today, that I found interesting. Even more interesting, because I rarely notice details!<\/p>\n

Whenever Facebook notifies you of an e-mail – like for example when a friend messages you – it will actually show you their e-mail. An example is in the screen shot below, which would enable me to click ‘reply’ to their e-mail and it would go directly to their personal e-mail. (I’ve noticed however, that this will only occur if you have already added the person as a friend.)<\/p>\n

\"direct<\/a><\/p>\n

This raises some interesting issues regarding privacy. The first being, why the heck is Facebook allowing this? Am I going to reply to my friends asking them what did they say in the message?! Privacy is my right to determine when people can see information about me when I want to<\/a> – and I don’t want my friends seeing my e-mail. I can think of an example when a friend collected my e-mail from my profile, and adding me to a forward list of chain e-mails. Unlike the postal system for snail mail, where people pay for sending me a message with a stamp, e-mail forces the user to pay when they receive a message through their time. Before I didn’t have a choice, but now with new ways of communicating, I can control what gets sent to me.<\/p>\n

This actually is a bit deeper. I’ve seen fake profiles friend request me – I always deny people I don’t know, but I know that lots of my friends usually add people blindly (I remember asking a friend who a friend requester was when I noticed she was a mutual friend with him, to which he replied: “No idea, but she’s hot!”). This now just became a very easy way to obtain someones e-mail – certainly, not as easy as harvesting e-mails from a public facing website, but still another means. The concerns however is not spam but identity threats.<\/p>\n

A crucial thing to understand about privacy, is the concept of identifiable data. Corporations can collect data about me until their heart is content and I wouldn’t mind- but only on the basis they can’t specifically identify me. An e-mail address is what I regard as identifiable information: the e-mail I use on various web services that hold different data about me, can be easily linked purely through my e-mail address.<\/p>\n

I’ve previously said how social networking sites are a new type of communications<\/a>, that are far better than e-mail. E-mail is one of the worlds most powerful technologies but also one of the most dangerous. Whilst most would think it is because of e-mail overload and spam, what I really mean is how a single e-mail address can do so much damage if used by someone trying to investigate you and your life.<\/p>\n

As our digital world becomes more sophisticated (and scary), lets be clear of some things. People no longer need e-mail to contact you; they can instead contact your ‘identity’ which is far superior (I discussed this in the posting I linked to just above). However with this advancement, also comes the opportunity to regard what your e-mail address really is: a key piece of identifiable data that can link your multiple identity’s across the digital world into one mega profile.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’ve had to neglect this blog because I have been insanely busy with work and my studies, and will continue to do so for the rest of the year. But I thought I’d post a quick observation I made today, that I found interesting. Even more interesting, because I rarely notice details! Whenever Facebook notifies […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[119,134,149,186,268,416,330,333,359,392],"class_list":["post-134","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-dataportability","tag-data","tag-e-mail","tag-facebook","tag-identity","tag-people","tag-privacy-dataportability","tag-social-networking-sites","tag-spam","tag-technology","tag-web","post-preview"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/eliasbizannes.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/134","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/eliasbizannes.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/eliasbizannes.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/eliasbizannes.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/eliasbizannes.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=134"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/eliasbizannes.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/134\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/eliasbizannes.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=134"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/eliasbizannes.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=134"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/eliasbizannes.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=134"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}