benrobb

Facebook is not run by philanthropists intent on providing a valuable service to the world by helping them keep in contact with people they know (or don’t know as the case may be).  It is run by businessmen who are making money in various ways that include selling advertising and personalization.

Not that there is anything inherently wrong with making money (I like to do that myself), but it does have an impact on how Facebook runs, and you should be aware of the ramifications.  Facebook was initially built on the foundation of privacy and a small group of your friends.  Overtime as the number of users grew, Facebook realized the power of what they’d built (they are now the most visited website on the Internet), they began to leverage their size in ways that required people’s profile information and activity to be more public.  If you haven’t looked at your privacy settings lately, you’re probably sharing with a much larger crowd than you anticipated.  See here for a vivid little demonstration of how Facebook has become more public over time.

Example #1

Every time you update your status, the contents are piped straight to all the major search engines, where search engines do what they do best: they index it and make it findable for anyone who types in related keywords.  In other words, the whole world can see what you write on Facebook, unless you’ve explicitly set your privacy settings to disallow this.  Explicit is the key word here, you can control all these settings, but now you have to set them manually to keep your information private, whereas before it was the default setting.

Example #2

You know all that information you put into your public profile?  Your name, hometown, likes, interests, musical preferences, favorite movies, favorite TV shows, etc?  Yeah, all that information is used to construct a demographic picture of you so that Facebook can target advertisements to you (I’m fine with that), but if you’re signed into Facebook and visit another site while still signed in, that site can also potentially see all the information in your profile.  This allows the site to personalize it’s interface to you which is powerful and actually pretty neat, but it allows a lot of other things to, and you should consciously be making the decision about whether the risk is worth the reward.

What’s Happening?

Keep in mind this is serious enough stuff that members of the US Senate are writing letters to Facebook’s leadership warning that the FTC may get involved if certain concerns aren’t addressed satisfactorily.

So for those who don’t follow tech news, if you don’t know what I mean when I talk about the Open Graph API or Instant Personalization (these are both Facebook “features”), I’ll almost gaurantee that you are sharing much more publicly than you thought you were.  Maybe that’s OK with you, but you should be aware of what you’re doing.  “Knowledge is power” and all that.

So What?

I’m not advocating a Facebook boycott like many in the tech world are doing.  Facebook provides a valuable service that I enjoy.  I am, however, advocating that you know the cost of the service that Facebook provides, even though that cost is not measured in dollars.

If you decide that you don’t want to share your details with the world and the rest of the web, Business Insider put together a handy little guide for putting Facebook on a “Privacy Lockdown”.  The guide will tell you to put everything to “Only Friends”.  You can choose your on level of comfort, I have most of mine set at “Friends of Friends”.

I love the complexity of what I do at work, but I don’t particularly enjoy it when it keeps me awake at night.  Sometimes I find myself laying in bed for an hour or two at a time, in the middle of the night, simply because my brain just won’t turn off.  I’ll find my thoughts looping through different scenarios and challenges I’m facing.  During this time of absolutely zero distraction, however, I find that I can often achieve a state of mental clarity that allows me to see solutions that I simply wouldn’t come up with during the daylight hours.

When that happens I think, “I have to remember that in the morning,” but the truth is that it rarely happens.  Until now.  Not that I can still remember it in the morning, but I’ve taken to writing them down at night.  On the night stand next to my bed, I have a notepad, a pen, and a small pen-light so that I can write down the thoughts that keep racing from one side to the other.

The two-sided benefit is that I don’t have to remember anymore, but it also helps me get back to sleep.  My theory is that because I want to remember these things, my sub-conscious keeps bringing them up, so I have trouble actually getting it out of my head.  Once it’s written down, my sub-conscious decides it can take a rest, which allows the rest of me to get back to sleep as well.  Psychology isn’t my strong point however, so feel free to call me out.

Often the light of day reveals that my midnight brilliance is more closely associated with madness, but more frequently, it proves to be just the solution that I needed.  If you have a similar problem, I’d recommend a notepad and pen at your bedside.  You might just sleep better at night.

P.S.  For those who prefer electronic notes to paper ones, I’ve got a geek crush on Evernote.