Risk Reduction Strategies on Social Networking Sites
By two teenagers:
Mikalah uses Facebook but when she goes to log out, she deactivates her Facebook account. She knows that this doesn’t delete the account that’s the point. She knows that when she logs back in, she’ll be able to reactivate the account and have all of her friend connections back. But when she’s not logged in, no one can post messages on her wall or send her messages privately or browse her content. But when she’s logged in, they can do all of that. And she can delete anything that she doesn’t like. Michael Ducker calls this practice “super-logoff” when he noticed a group of gay male adults doing the exact same thing.
And:
Shamika doesn’t deactivate her Facebook profile but she does delete every wall message, status update, and Like shortly after it’s posted. She’ll post a status update and leave it there until she’s ready to post the next one or until she’s done with it. Then she’ll delete it from her profile. When she’s done reading a friend’s comment on her page, she’ll delete it. She’ll leave a Like up for a few days for her friends to see and then delete it.
I’ve heard this practice called wall scrubbing.
In any reasonably competitive market economy, sites would offer these as options to better serve their customers. But in the give-it-away user-as-product economy we so often have on the Internet, the social networking sites have a different agenda.
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Anonymous Prime • December 1, 2010 1:48 PM
just more rearranging of deck chairs on the titanic.
when will people get it? the facebook privacy problem has zero to do with which other users can see which of your profile fields.
for as long as your personally identifying information and personal & professional affiliations are stored on a server that’s in the chain of command of someone like mark zuckerberg, your privacy is actively violated.