See, this is the kind of thing which creeps me out about Facebook.

David Jimerson

David Jimerson

Administrator
Staff member
In the "people you may know" block, the 10 year-old son of someone I went to undergrad with popped up.

There is absolutely nothing in his profile (which is entirely open, but that's another matter) which would link him to me, not even the slightest reference to his father. He only has 4 friends, and I don't know or know of any of them. He has very little information on himself in his profile. The ONLY thing even remotely in common is liking Iron Man.

I haven't even been in contact with his father for quite some time, well before Facebook. The only reason I even know who the kid is is because of his last name and that he looks just like his dad.

Yet, Facebook still managed to make the connection somehow.

Things like that have many disturbing implications, not the least of which being a potential danger to a 10 year-old, if I were some kind of sociopath.
 
I've done workshops here for middle-school students on safe Internet practices. One of the biggest topics I hit is the danger of non-secured social media profiles, and how tags in pictures can make it worse. We also talk about how much/little information really needs to be out there on the Internet.

It's scary sometimes. My three rules of Internet usage:

1) Never post anything to the Internet that you wouldn't want your mother, or any current or future schools/employers, to see.
2) Once you put it on the Internet, it is there forever.
3) Before you put it on the Internet, please refer to rules 1 and 2.
 
A 10 year old has a facebook profile? How did that happen.

As for the connection, I assume you and his father are friends on facebook, if that's the case, that's the only connection facebook needs. But who knows, there might be some more complicated methods they use, the bigger issue is why the hell does a 10 year old has a facebook account.
 
As I said, I've had no contact with his father, on or off the grid, since before Facebook existed. His father wouldn't even have a relevant e-mail address for me.

There aren't any picture tags or anything else which would make the connection.
 
I know several kids younger than 10 who have FB profiles. Some even in my own family. I think it's retarded, and has the potential to be incredibly dangerous if the kid is allowed to use the site without a parent or guardian keeping a constant eye on their profile to ensure their safety. Most of the kids that I know (the youngest that I've allowed to add me as a friend is 13, I believe, and I only allowed it because he frequents a filmmaking forum I'm on) simply use the profile to play the games on FB.

It is disturbing, both that little children have FB profiles and that FB can search your memories to find ancient connections to people you used to kind of know. <grin>

In fact, I find your experience more disturbing than the countless "OMG, Facebook just changed its privacy settings so that now everyone in the world can see naked pictures of you that you didn't even know existed!!! ZOMG, copy and paste!!!!!11!!one!!" that pop up in my newsfeed...
 
David Jimerson said:
In the "people you may know" block, the 10 year-old son of someone I went to undergrad with popped up.

There is absolutely nothing in his profile (which is entirely open, but that's another matter) which would link him to me, not even the slightest reference to his father. He only has 4 friends, and I don't know or know of any of them. He has very little information on himself in his profile. The ONLY thing even remotely in common is liking Iron Man.

I haven't even been in contact with his father for quite some time, well before Facebook. The only reason I even know who the kid is is because of his last name and that he looks just like his dad.

Yet, Facebook still managed to make the connection somehow.

Things like that have many disturbing implications, not the least of which being a potential danger to a 10 year-old, if I were some kind of sociopath.
Click to expand...

Forget Facebook, this is the real threat to all your information placed knowingly or unknowingly on the web. Some one with an application that can scour all your little bits and pieces from all over the net can potentially do real harm to anything you have that is linked in any way online. Bank stuff, IRS returns, stocks, property...you name it. Doesn't have to be a catastrophic hit either...they could nibble away and you might not notice right away or at all. I mean, David...your face and voice are available from that thing you did in front of Best Buy!

Just because I'm paranoid doesn't mean their not out to get me!
 
It's for these and many other reasons, I have shunned FB from the beginning. Never got an account, felt it totally unnecessary to follow all the lemmings. But more and more of my friends are on FB, and at this point it's hard to communicate or organize anything if you're not on FB - email is not being used much, and forget about calling someone. Anyhow, the only way I'm able to function not being on FB, is that my wife is on FB, and I can always use her account. And because my wife is on FB, I find myself out there in photos and stuff on her account, and people are coming out of the woodwork to contact me, and I find myself having to respond and interact - exactly what I did not want. The damn FB is like some kind of virus you cannot avoid. I still don't have an account, but honestly, I don't know how long I'll last before having to give in. Horrible.
 
Well, my face and voice are readily available from a lot of places. :) (God help everyone.)

Of course it's symptiomatic of something much bigger, but as OldCorpse says, not being on Facebook is quickly becoming like not having a telephone.
 
OldCorpse said:
It's for these and many other reasons, I have shunned FB from the beginning. Never got an account, felt it totally unnecessary to follow all the lemmings. But more and more of my friends are on FB, and at this point it's hard to communicate or organize anything if you're not on FB - email is not being used much, and forget about calling someone. Anyhow, the only way I'm able to function not being on FB, is that my wife is on FB, and I can always use her account. And because my wife is on FB, I find myself out there in photos and stuff on her account, and people are coming out of the woodwork to contact me, and I find myself having to respond and interact - exactly what I did not want. The damn FB is like some kind of virus you cannot avoid. I still don't have an account, but honestly, I don't know how long I'll last before having to give in. Horrible.
Click to expand...

^The only reason I haven't deleted mine.
 
Al MacLeod said:
Forget Facebook, this is the real threat to all your information placed knowingly or unknowingly on the web. Some one with an application that can scour all your little bits and pieces from all over the net can potentially do real harm to anything you have that is linked in any way online. Bank stuff, IRS returns, stocks, property...you name it. Doesn't have to be a catastrophic hit either...they could nibble away and you might not notice right away or at all. I mean, David...your face and voice are available from that thing you did in front of Best Buy!

Just because I'm paranoid doesn't mean their not out to get me!
Click to expand...

Umm... ad generators already do this on a mass scale. They collect data about your internet usage (what you've searched for, what pages you've looked at, where you spend most of your time, etc.) and use them to generate relevant ads across a plethora of websites. I don't have the link, but I read an article all about this some months ago.
 
I still don't have a facebook account. Never liked Facebook.

People who can't give me a call or send me an email don't want to talk to me badly enough.

The only problem I have with it is that my film needs to be on there and I've been putting it off getting an official Marianne FB group (or whatever it's called there). Now I might have to.
 
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