Facebook recently added a feature called News Feed... which basically shows you everything and anything your friends do on Facebook... comment, post pictures, update status, join or leave groups... it's a little much. While I can appreciate some elements of this, I don't need to, nor do I want to know everything my "friends" on Facebook are doing, and nor do I want them to know everything I'm doing. The largest group on Facebook popped up over night with more than 400,000 members protesting the new feature.
Blogger Danah Boyd wrote a very interesting essay about Facebook's new and reviled News Feed feature.
In the tech world, we have a bad tendency to view the concept of "private" as a single bit that is either 0 or 1. Either it's exposed or not. When companies make a decision to make data visible in a more "efficient" manner, there is often a panic. And the term "privacy" is often invoked. Think back to when Deja made Usenet searchable. The term is also invoked when companies provide new information to you based on the data you had previously given it. Think back to the shock over Gmail's content-based ad delivery. Neither of these are about privacy in the bit sense but they ARE about privacy in a different sense.
Privacy is not simply about the state of an inanimate object or set of bytes; it is about the sense of vulnerability that an individual experiences. When people feel exposed or invaded, there's a privacy issue.
What happened with Facebook was not about a change in the bit state - it was about people feeling icky. It made people felt icky for different reasons - some felt it for the exposure while others felt it for the invasion.
Read the rest of the article on Danah's Blog
Found via Boing Boing
As for me the Film Festival has been pretty boring so far... Still haven't seen a single movie. Stupid work schedule and rush lines have not been kind to me. Hopefully things will pick up.In the mean time, keep watching the skiis.
I mean skies.
- Will
FipiLele