After a story about Twitter for Marie Claire India in Sept’09, I have a piece on social interaction and being a safe netizen in the Oct’09 issue, which is out on the stands now. I’d love to hear your comments and also your thoughts, if any, on other internet-related topics you’d like to read about.
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Someone from the neighboring cubicle (SNC): He calls you his ‘Office spouse’?? What on earth is that? Didn’t he just get married a month back? ME: Yeah, that’s in his personal life. An office spouse is someone you talk to, share your problems with, are friendly with, get over your…
The boy gleefully tells me that a Grand Theft Auto (GTA) mission that he just completed, is called ‘Blogger This…!‘. In the game, a blogger has raised the shackles of a nightclub owner because of his negative posts about the club, after being denied entry into it. So the mission…
I admit to being a troll. I didn’t even read the article. Why would I deny it? You been trolled girl. I even snickered a little when I called you a troll.
You mention I didn’t ID myself… very observant! My name Kalpana Ravindran kalpanaxr@gmail.com
No wait it’s Baburao Chauhan babu24@mymail.com. There, I am no longer a troll in your eyes.
In an ideal world I would be writing articles about online “privacy” and you would be learning something from them. But we live in an imperfect world so don’t share your photos online!! OMFG RLY YOU DON’T SAY, CAPTAIN OBVIOUS??!!1111ONE
@M: I hope you’ve enjoyed yourself. I am blocking your IP address and your comments will not show up on my blogs, in the future.
Ramya,
You’re either trolling or you’ve completely missed the point despite spending a big part of life online. I’m going to go with the latter coz I have great faith in human stupidity. 🙂 Facebook is geared to let people stalk you, if they want to badly enough. The defaults are tweaked to keep the casual peeping tom at bay… unless he actually makes an effort to get to his target, then it’s game over.
Bottomline: If you don’t want something to go public, don’t put it online. Even with every privacy setting tweaked to the extreme there will be a backdoor that’ll be discovered, sooner or later. And FB has already had more than a couple. If you’re not pointing this out to your users then you are doing them a disservice by creating a false sense of security. And I’m not wearing a tin foil hat either, just Google “facebook security breach”.
@M: “Facebook is geared to let people stalk you.” I’m guessing you mean the snooping through people’s photographs, pages liked etc. I do enough of this myself, going by the principle that if you don’t want people to know about these things, you shouldn’t put them up online anyway. You mentioned the casual peeping tom. I’d like to add to that a certain other kind of stalker too whose behaviour crosses creepy and goes into the realm of dangerous. A number of my friends have faced this, with ‘admirers’ who turn up at their places of work, use their email addresses to harass them online and steal photographs from albums and blogs (and I’ll let you imagine what they do after that). I’d say this is a sizable danger considering how many such cases I know. Please think about whether a person should live in mortal fear or just disconnect from the social network out to keep away such elements, especially when they have the option to protect themselves.
I also need you to look at the date on this post and on the article. Facebook and the rest of social media has been undergoing several changes and momentous happenings (including security breaches) since that time. I’ve written about the state of affairs as I saw it, at the time the article was written. Also, “If you’re not pointing this out to your users then you are doing them a disservice by creating a false sense of security.”. If you go back and read the article, you’ll find I’ve mentioned that more information shared = more attention and that the key is to find a balance between access and security.
Having said all of this, I also note that you have not bothered to identify yourself or leave behind a contact. But you begin your comment by calling me a troll and make allegations (that I hope are laid to rest with the explanation above). I’ll end by pointing you in the direction of this article and leave you to ponder who the troll is over here. Thank you for commenting.
I think the author gave some good hints. You really should be careful which informations you put on the Internet. I do not know if there are many cases of stalking on the net, but nevertheless I think its better to have some privacy. Would be great to get to know more about this.
@Pranav: Thank you. I was the author, incidentally. The article was published in Marie Claire India October 2009. And yes, stalking online is an alarmingly high trend.
@Ms Taggart: My anonymity was released a long time ago with the media mentions and over a month back on my own blog when I wrote ‘Anonymous’.