h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I have recently succumbed to facebook after years of resistance, and one of the things that intrigues me about it is the way it joins things up.

So, for example, I couldn't find any friends without it having access to my mail account - at which point it obviously went through all my messages, and started offering me allergy companies (my sons have food allergies). It wants me to be friends with my former landlord of ten years ago (and all her friends). I was playing a game last night, and it wants to publish my 'achievements' on facebook... And so on. Google is the same, if I would let it. And yes, I have restricted my privacy settings.

It basically assumes that people have one on-line persona, with their real name, and that they join their friends, family, employer and leisure interests together under that name. And they are open about this aim - both facebook and google CEOs have made public pronouncements about this being the future.

I really wonder whether this meets peoples needs - I mean, my life is really an open book with very few secrets, but I don't necessarily need my colleagues to know every last detail of my home life - my friends are maybe not that interested in the kind of views and writing I put on hootoo, and nobody cares that I made a level in Settlers or anyother game...

What do you think - is this really the future - will our children live their lives in such an open way? Or this just some kind of temporary trend?

sprout

I dislike google+ I can't seem to unsubscribe. Does it give my details to friends of friends without me being able to prevent it, since I foolishly joined? Anyone know is there a way out of google+ please?

As for Facebook, most young people seem to be there with names that are not those on their passport... unless they are very strict about what they post. I've not given FB permission to search my email addresses either. I don't want it to do that.

Young people know exactly how best to set their privacy on facebook, and all I know make good use of it.

Lanza, to get out of google+ you need to delete your profile, I think. Have a look in the settings, there should e the option somewhere.

And you decide who sees what on google+, so if you don't post there, nobody will see anything bar your profile.

I have a G+ account that is attached to my 'real name' email address, also a linkedIn account. That's for work. As a general rule, unless I am personally close to someone, I don't have colleagues on FB. As it pans out, I have no colleagues as friends on fb, but it's not a never never situation.

When job searching recently I did google myself to see what links up and what doesn't as my fb is very much a private life of me place and is not for work's consumption. I want to be able to post what I want to friends and family without it being an issue for my employer. Personally, I like to keep the *option* of having two separate profiles online. As soon as I combine them, it's gone.

For the record, it's surprising what links up and how. Sometimes an HR minded search of one's self is an interesting and revealing thing to do!

As for 'kids today' I don't know. I think that being a part of it isn't such a bad thing, but I would prefer to have the option to be more private without having to double, triple, quadruple check and play with stuff to make sure that some people can't just *see* things that are between me and my friends and would in olden days only have been seen in the photos stuck in the frame of my mirror!

Facebook knows I go paragliding. It knows almost nothing else about my life. Almost all my friends are fellow pilots. It is a tool for coordinating my flying, and little more, to me. The day there's a better tool for that, I'll use that instead. Twitter was tried, but failed.

I don't play games through Facebook, I don't read newspaper stories linked through Facebook (if I see a story in my timeline that looks interesting, I google it in another window).

I may, possibly, be missing out on some of the useful features, but I already get enough junk mail, thanks.

I like the idea some Yank came up with that kids ought to be able to have a moratorium on their online activities at 18 - as in, anything they posted under their real name before that age is expunged. Good luck implementing that, but it's a nice idea.

Realistically, I think day to day privacy is something future generations will look upon as a quaint relic of olden days. They'll expect to be advertised at everywhere. They'll have systems to deal with it, filters to remove the spam from their everyday lives. It's an arms race between the filter makers and the ad makers, and it will continue forever.

I don't think it's necessarily a bad thing. People who don't want to be laughed at for having done something embarrassing should simply avoid doing embarrassing things.

We're in a short transitionary period at the moment where people like police officers and racists on trams haven't quite got the memo yet that if you're in public, you're on film, potentially. Right now, people still behave in public as though they're in private, on the grounds that they're surrounded by people they don't know and will never see again, and can therefore behave any way they like with impunity. In ten or twenty years' time, a generation will have grown up watching these idiots make fools of themselves on Youtube, and will modify their public behaviour accordingly.

Personally, I think that will make the world a nicer place to be, and I'm all for it.

"Facebook knows I go paragliding. It knows almost nothing else about my life. Almost all my friends are fellow pilots. It is a tool for coordinating my flying, and little more, to me." [Hoovooloo]

That sounds pretty . Whenever I visit my mother in anursing home, and we sit in the garden, there are apt to be gliders passing overhead.

"We're in a short transitionary period at the moment where people like police officers and racists on trams haven't quite got the memo yet that if you're in public, you're on film, potentially. Right now, people still behave in public as though they're in private, on the grounds that they're surrounded by people they don't know and will never see again, and can therefore behave any way they like with impunity. In ten or twenty years' time, a generation will have grown up watching these idiots make fools of themselves on Youtube, and will modify their public behaviour accordingly."

I hope you're right.

Do you?

I'm in two minds. On the one hand, when one sees Youtube videos of people having racist rants on trams or attacking a man from behind with a baton and knocking him to the ground when he had his hands in his pockets and posed no threat, my response when the people in question have their lives ruined by becoming famous is "welcome to the 21st century, scumbag".

On the other, I'm not sure I'm entirely comfortable with the idea that people will be nice to each other because they're actually scared of becoming famous (in a bad way) if they're not. (That said, at least the threat of internet fame for bad behaviour is REAL. I'd rather people went in fear of that than that they behaved themselves because they'd been brought up to believe that if they didn't they'd go to hell.)

Since I don't go round shouting racist abuse, attacking passersby etc., I don't feel I have much to fear from our increasingly video-surveilled world. The worst I can expect, I think, is that something I do that's embarrassing (say, walking into a lamppost) might make it onto Failblog or similar - but I can live with that.

Is there a downside to there being video cameras effectively everywhere, in the hands of the citizenry? (Apart from happy-slapping and similar criminal activity, that is?)

I don't know that it is a serious downside, but having cameras constantly to hand does sometimes cause people to detach themselves from what is going on around them. I was struck by this while watching the athletes entering the stadium in the Olympic opening ceremony. A lot of them were spending their whole time filming everything with their phones. While I can understand them wanting a record of a once-in-a-lifetime experience, I did wonder if they were so concerned with recording the experience that they weren't actually experiencing the experience.

I'm also in two minds. While I, similarly, don't feel I have anything to hide (I'm not interesting enough) it could be very threatening for people who need to keep personas separate, say, those who have homophobic parents or trans-phobic work colleagues.

I've got lots of thoughts on this, but I sat in the pub typing on my phone, so I'll keep it short.

We are in a transition period, people are getting used to the idea that the internet isn't a completely private place, and nothing is every completely removed. And companies are still figuring out the boundaries of how much invasion they can do while trying to be helpful, as well as selling us stuff.

I recently had my phone repaired, and when I got it back and put the sim card in, it hooked into my gmail account (android phone) and set up my phonebook and contacts as well as my email accounts for me. It was trying to be helpful, but I found it a blooming imposition.

I have walked into lampposts more than once. I've bumped into the end of the pool where I swim. I'm a klutz, what can I say? If examples of my klutziness and on YouTube, then at least I'm contributing to the world's entertainment needs.

*are* on YouTube. My fingers are klutzy, too.

Would CCTV replace gods? Who needs an ever-watching god when up have an ever-watching public? Dunno, just thinking out loud, really.

Facebook knows only the things that I don't have a problem with either my parents or in laws knowing. Which is basically everything that isn't in some way related to sex.

I don't have one real-life persona so I'm certainly not going to strive for one online one. I deal with some fairly ... difficult ... clients and I absolutely do not want them looking up my address or phone number or personal email address or any other way of contacting me outside of office hours. So I have two names (both, unfortunately, wholly unique).

Waste of time really. Anybody searching on my work name could find out the village where I live and if they sent me a letter just addressed to me at the village the postlady would stick it through the door. It's really *hard* to keep it all private now, what with practically every organisation having a website (for example, if I go to the parish council meeting, I get named in the minutes, and the minutes are put on the internet, and come up on a search).

What freaked me out about FB was the time I went on it at work (during lunch, natch) and it suggested clients to me as friends, based on my work email.

Unfortunately I've totally mucked up anyway, by linking my two names on Twitter. So if clients find me on there, they can find my real name, and it's harder for me to hide. Oh well. Only a handful are actually *dangerous*.

My children all have unique names but they are au fait with privacy settings etc and the youngest isn't on FB yet anyway because he's underage (and I'm strict about that). However, he did manage to set up a YouTube account with his friend, and they posted a video of a tour around our house (which was less than sparkling on the day they were filming), including footage of my husband lying mostly naked on the bed. The video came up on a google search of our surname. My husband works in a school. Erm ...

Mol

I wouldn't even want to share the same things with all my different friends & acquaintances, let alone work colleagues, officials or patients that I see. So I've stayed off FB. But who knows what info iabout me is out there, that's been put on by someone else?

All this requires energy, more and more energy. Cheap energy is not going to last that much longer. Food prices will increase as the need for land to grow energy (biofuel) will compete with food agriculture. Nuclear power seems to be the most realistic way forward.

Your mobile phone also dubs as a tracking device. Face recognition software is not too far away - biometrics would be useful way to help break through individuals various aliases.

>>Since I don't go round shouting racist abuse, attacking passersby etc., I don't feel I have much to fear from our increasingly video-surveilled world.

The trouble could start if footage is taken out of context and used by people with a grudge against you. For example, racist train* rant lady was presumably provoked by someone, but we didn't get to see the provocation ( and she wasn't even particularly racist, and should really have been vilified for being drunk in charge of children).

However, I'm still undecided about all the surveillance, it seems that a lot of bad guys get caught with it (or so we are lead to believe).


*as the old joke goes, why did they build a racist train?