What's your take on facebook? Is it the root of all evil for our society? Is it a nice place to catch up with old friends? Is it the new stalker capital of the world?
Until recently, I've never really thought too much about Facebook. I've been on Facebook since it "came" to my college. It was a fun way to keep up with friends who attended different colleges than you, it seemed harmless. Now everyone and their brother has it.
It's scary. To think that that many people can see a lot about you. I never post when Jesse's gone for the weekend or long periods of time, because I figure, what if somebody reads that? After all, most crimes are committed by someone you know. (I swear, I heard that somewhere and really, I think it's true). Now days with places like Facebook, Myspace, Twitter, etc... stalkers are able to gain access about your whereabouts. It's scary to think that someone reading my status updates on Facebook may be looking for just the right time to stop by my house to rob it while nobody's home.
The other day, I spent about 45 minutes deleting Facebook friends because I figured 900 people don't need to know what I'm doing with my life and if they need to know, they can use the old fashion way of calling, e-mailing or just word of mouth.
I deleted over 200 people and still need to do some weeding out. I would hate to think that any of those "friends" would actually be using my information against me. Afterall, I'm sure they probably aren't, but what if they were? So anyway, I've decided to be more choosey when it comes to who is my "friend" on Facebook.
I'm sure one of these days when we have kids, I may decide to go private with my blog, but then again, maybe not. Who knows. I know where there is a will, there's a way for most criminals, I just think we should make it a little harder for them. I'm not a twitter'er (?) and I haven't "myspaced" in about a year, so I'm trying to limit those things as well.
Maybe I'm just being paranoid and thinking everyone's a creeper, but better safe than sorry I always say!
So what's your take on these Social networking sites? I think it can be awesome and scary all at the same time. Thoughts??
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9 comments:
You are right about Facebook, so many people use that against you and are always so nosy. I only have friends on my account that I personally know or I've met them online and they live far away... I never post anything personal like address or phone number or anything.. but with the internet anymore, if they know your last they can look you up from white pages and other directories. I think if you use FB wisely it shouldn't be any harm. My account was actually hacked into back last Sept. I was 9 months pregnant, and the person who hacked my account was from another country (so they said) and was chatting with my online friends trying to get money from them. He claimed to be me saying I was in London and had been mugged and needed money to get home. None of my friends believed him.. and in a way it could have been because I mentioned earlier in the day I was going somewhere so my friends new I wasn't in London and they knew I was 9 months pregnant. I've since then started a new account and been cautious, but sometimes I find myself being a little to informative too.
You had 900 friends.. goodness... I don't even know that many people! HA!
I think when used properly, facebook can be a really neat tool. There are some family members and friends that I would hardly ever get to hear from if it weren't for facebook. I like the idea of my aunts and uncles and cousins getting to see pictures of my baby when its born -- but at the same time, I don't like the idea of anybody and their mother seeing these pictures. I've recently done a majorrrrrrrrrr facebook purge and deleted a lot of people and I'm going to go through again and do some more cutting back. I also think I'm going to temporarily deactivate my account when I go into labor because I know too many people who have found out that a niece/nephew/cousin/friend was born and they found out on facebook before the parents could let them know. I want to make sure that everyone who needs to hear it from us, through a phone call or email hears the news before it goes "public"
I've done the same thing recently and routinely checking my privacy settings.
I have a rule where I don't go over 160 friends and my profile is so private.
if you aren't friends with one of my friends you can't even send me a friend request (how many time did I just write friends???? lol)
My photos are only available to people on my friends list, i've even been known to block people from seeing my photos.
I also have a "restricted" friends list where they can only see my wall, some photos and thats it. No status updates, nothing!
xx
I go back and forth about this too. In the last year I have went from over 500 'friends' to less than 200. It's mostly family now...I like it that way. I went with the 'if I wouldn't stop and have a conversation with them at the grocery store..they're gone' theory. So far so good! :)
I think social networking is good in some aspects and it's good that we can contect to people we might not have been able to 20 years ago or so... but there are terrible things that can come from it.
I'm not sure what I'm going to allow my kids to do. It is scary! I need to weed through my facebook too.!
I never really thought about it that way but you do have a point. I am very careful about not sharing my last name on my blog because I do share my first name and my location. It might not do much if someone recognizes me out in public but without my last name people will be hard pressed to find my address, phone number, etc. As far as facebook goes, I only accept the requests of people I know but now that I think about it I should probably go through and weed some people out. I'm rarely ever on facebook anyway but when I am on, I would rather less people have access to the information that I have chosen to share.
I think having some ground rules about safety online is important--I think you know that J and I have an agreement not to give out our address to anyone we don't know in real life, which is sad when bloggers are doing awesome giveaways, but I understand why we have that agreement across the board!
FB freaks me out. I've been meaning to do some serious clean up on there for a while now... they just aren't careful with people's information and it's just not right.
My blog and twitter though, I try to be fairly anonymous with that - at least with our names and specific locations for sure. It's harder with the blog, but Twitter can easily be much more protective of privacy than other forms of social media if you just watch what you say.
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