Dan: “Why the hell can't I get on Google+ to see what the hype is about? I'm gonna go ahead and blame Mark Zuckerberg for this somehow.”
Me: “@DanFenner I think we should both petition surrogate brain immediately.” “@DanFenner speech recognition error. I meant Sergey Brin, Google head honcho. Although maybe Google really is run by a brain in a jar.”
Dan: "It cannot be ruled out as a possibility, haha.”Now at the time that joke really was a happy accident caused by a speech recognition gaffe. Then something happened that caused me to examine my social media habits.
A friend of mine abruptly left Facebook. They sent out an updated e-mail address to their friends and they were gone. At first I thought they were overreacting. After all, Mark Zuckerberg is constantly pushing the limits, but most of the time things turn out okay if you just tinker with the privacy settings. Besides, if all of your friends are on here, you'd be crazy to leave.
Then I remembered an old adage about the Brooklyn Bridge, and decided I would do a of my own investigation before blindly adhering to the Cult of Mark.
This person's complaint had to do with the chat system and messaging system on Facebook undergoing mandatory integration. Thus, a copy of your chats is automatically saved into your Facebook inbox. Personally, I don't have a huge problem with the idea of this, because the viewing of the messages between any two people is still limited to those involved. That is, until I discovered something a little scary.
I want to scroll up and see just how many messages were there. I started scrolling up and down the bar to be interminable. By the time I stopped (and I'm sure I wasn't at the end), I discovered Facebook had been archiving messages between my friend and I for a least a year and a half. Although I will admit to being an early adopter, this was well before Facebook had even announced the new messaging system. It is a little disconcerting.
This is not the first time Facebook has freaked me out a little. It no longer surprises me to see targeted advertisements based on what I put in my status updates, for example.
Initially, I applauded my friend's gutsy move to switch entirely to a Gmail address. "Google doesn't save anything," I said.
Then I realize this isn't entirely true, and even in the context I meant it, a more accurate statement might be: "Google doesn't save anything... yet."
Google already saves your search history, something I think almost everyone can tell from just using the toolbar at the top of their browser. Not too creepy, and that's just convenient. It is almost impossible however, not to notice the fact that Google is serving up incredibly specific ads to other websites, based upon the things you search for. With Google+, Google's foray into the social networking space, in limited field trial (side note: why can't I get in? The thing can't be that limited if everyone on the Oakland Post editorial staff has a profile, but I digress.), is it not inconceivable that as more and more people start using it Google would start marching in the same direction as Facebook has been? What if suddenly everyone with a Gmail address had a profile by default? What's to stop Google from mining the data for the benefit of advertisers? I think it's gotten to the point where we are safe nowhere on the Internet from everything we write being kept in some persistent record. That's probably not a big problem for me, because as an aspiring journalist, I know that anything you make available at any point can probably be traced back to you. As such, I've treated the Internet is a public forum for a while now. That doesn't work well for everybody. It would be odd if a future civilization found my headstone and it only contained things from my Internet history.
Here lies Kevin Patrick Graham
frustrated insomniac, gamer, writer, technology nerd,
obsessed with music videos; biggest life regret:
never being able to pass level 14 in the
third world of Angry Birds
All those things might be accurate on some level, but they don't really tell you anything beyond the statistics. Sadly, we are already starting to see this taking place. I have 179 Facebook friends, and I might talk to 10 of them on a regular basis. The only window I have into the lives of the others is whatever they post in public. Public image can be very different from private reality. It's hard to say who we really know. So I'm skeptical of anything that starts trying to tell someone who you really are based on that music video you posted a month ago. I know it sounds a little far-fetched, but isn't that the goal of all advertising? They find out what makes you tick so they can sell you their product. There's nowhere to hide.
That said, I will be getting on this Google+ thingy as soon as I can. Everyone's talking about it.
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