There are many accounts with my name (mine is suspended).
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Actually they are building the get out the vote database for Zuckerberg 2020.
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Outrageous. Luckily for me I’m not affected because I don’t have a facebook account.
Well, yes. Facebook shouldn’t attempt to decide who is normal and who needs checking.
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You’re actually putting forward an argument as to why Facebook should be banned. It has no credible means of reliably identifying users. And it doesn’t stop people trying to pick up other people at the mall.
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Sorry that wasn’t clear, I was talking about SSN, not Facebook.
Yep. That’s now. It’s what Facebook will be and how it will be used in 20 years that has me worried. cf Amazon, cf Trump, cf Google.
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In my relatively-small career area of specialty, there are at least two professional associations for which Facebook is the sole way to interact online with the membership as a group, read what serves as their newsletter, get dates/locations for networking opportunities like conferences, or get info re licensing, etc.
How many others work like this?
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I don’t wish to split hairs, but in the interests of clarity, I am not (personally) arguing for banning Facebook. Mister Zuckerberg was instrumental in the US elections, and I fear also interfered with the UK election and Brexit vote, so he is no friend of mine.
No, it is easy to mock stuff. I hope to do is to appeal to the engineer’s usual urge to attack a good problem. The idea of protecting us against terrorism in the air is deeply flawed unless you get around the huge ratio of probable false positives to each real one. Here we do not have to outwit the lone terrorist with no regard for their own life, but the much more common and less sophisticated set of some Dirty Old Men trying to hunt down cheerleaders. In which case, asking dodgy people to provide a quick selfie - no time to hack up something sophisticated - strikes me as 80% of a workable solution.
If this could work, our next problem is “Who would we prefer to handle this than Facebook?”. And how?
Oof, that’s a good call.
Thanks for the tip!
That’s true. In the other hand, there are also people that stay in Facebook to participate in special-interest, mutual-help, and support groups, such as groups of families of people afflicted by specific medical conditions.
You’re rebutting an argument I did not actually make.
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Of course they’re evil. They’re super evil. TV was fairly evil too, for that matter.
I am not defending Facebook the corporation. I’m saying that social media has legitimate uses, and it sucks that it’s mostly controlled by evil dudes. Just like TV, come to think.
Use case: Easily maintaining an ongoing conversation between a large, loosely-linked group of people, and facilitating new connections, without messing around with mailing lists and Reply All and spamming people’s inboxes with hundreds of posts.
No, not IRC. Chatrooms have their uses too, but Facebook is threaded and easier to sift through, among other things.
Again, don’t assume that I’m defending Facebook’s policies. Amazon is also evil, and I can see a moral argument for boycotting them, but no one would argue that they don’t provide a useful service.
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One more thing about Facebook: while I of course respect your right to not get an account, the reality is that a lot of people are there, from all walks of life. Progressives can also engage the people there and bring their point of view. It could be seen as the current town square, the digital Speakers’ Corner. I have friends that spend part of their time arguing with conservatives in Facebook. I don’t do it myself, but I admire their tenacity and their willingness to talk to people that have very different opinions.
An example of a good use of Facebook: help organize your people:
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They’ll delete it from THEIR servers. Keeping it on a business partner’s server (owned by FB) where they can check it and retrieve it again any time. I won’t fall for this one again.
I am reluctant to hand out that kind of information because I used to
write security software for a living (retired now) and I know just how
insecure that kind of software is.
I found other (new) forums to support my 3D printer, so I am staying
completely away from Facebook.
MikeOr her nude photographs.
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No, it couldn’t. Because those can be used by anymore, without the say-so of the owner. With Facebook, you have exactly one arbiter who controls whom your stuff gets presented to.
Facebook isn’t the village square, it’s The Village.
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