In today's "Tina's Groove," Tina contemplates the lure of signing up to be cyber-stalked in exchange for making a comment that will instantly melt within an ocean of comments or will go unread by anyone on a story that she alone cares about.
Once she signs up to be a member, of course, she will belong to them.
One of the main advantages of owning your own domain is that you can create pseudonymous personalities at the drop of a hat so that, for instance, if you were asked to register at Fred Ziffel's Bacon Gazette, you could register as [email protected] and comment away. Then, later, if you start getting spam, you can look, see that it's addressed to [email protected] and filter the entire address.
This also applies, of course, to registering at commercial sites like Amazon as well as places you would have to be an idiot to register at.
In the latter category: About ten years ago, a friend was looking for a teaching gig and I offered to look around for her on line. I registered at a place that promised to be a teaching-position-ad-aggregator, only to find that the only ads they had were rip-offs trying to get you to sign up for non-existent jobs teaching English in Korea.
A decade later, my spam folder still gets mail for [email protected] and I am very grateful that I didn't sign up under my real address.
And then there's the Winston Smith issue.
Today, many sites offer you the option of signing in through Facebook, so that all your friends there can see that you were commenting on an article at BigBouncyBosoms.com or FlamingPoliticalDweebs.org. And, if you're not careful, you'll find that the site has already logged you in.
Those following the parallels between our current political system and 1984 will find the answer to "How did Big Brother bring everyone under surveillance?" in all of this: He didn't have to do much of anything. We signed ourselves up so that we could make Comment #1584 among the 6,289 comments on a picture of a cute, ungrammatical, functionally illiterate kitten.
Imagining, of course, a cybercafe somewhere in which hipsters sit around drinking $9 coffee and saying, "Ah, but I think Comment #1584 really nailed it! What wit! What verve! A comment that shall live forever!"
As I understand it, the world is flat, sticky, has a long tail and will follow you anywhere.
I have long since turned off all the apps on Facebook, mostly to avoid the constant updates on who had grown what in Farmville or received what sparkly jewels or whatever, and the deluge of inspirational, app-syndicated glurge.
But when Facebook made its latest changes, I moved it over to a dedicated browser, added Better Facebook to do some ongoing scrubbing and doublechecked those "get me out of here" settings.
Here's what I think I've figured out: You can turn off what you see on Facebook a lot better than you can turn off what other people see, and not just on Facebook.
I had Better Facebook hide the ticker on the right gutter, but, before I did, I noticed that friends who had announced that they were disabling their likes and comments and so forth were still featured, and so I could track all their likes and whatever they said to people I didn't know.
And with my apps turned off, I can't see anything in the little boxes at other sites telling me who of my friends have been there, but I'm betting that, if I go there with my Facebook browser and make any kind of peep, they'll all get the news.
It's all a little weird and freaky, and I'm someone who, for the most part, is not obsessed with privacy. I don't mind if people know I'm a recluse. Hey, there can be money in that racket.
But don't sign up for it under your real name.
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