What would it take to get me on Facebook?

In a word: Trust.

Nearly every week, I consider making a Facebook account. I get notices about events for which the full details are on Facebook. I hear stories about people connecting with old friends. My old students and old friends are surprised that they are unable to find me.

I love being in touch with people. I moved around a bit growing up and became quite the correspondent. I have boxes of letters I still move from house to house with me, treasured belongings even though I never look back at them.

Parenthood sucked up the leisure time I used to use for letter-writing, and now I email with some folk, and most years put stamps only on those embarrassing holiday letters we all send out. (Confession: Okay, I actually love reading people’s holiday letters, but I feel very unhip and un-GenX for saying that without irony.)

Friendster seemed interesting (yes, I am really GenX), but in my pre-librarian life I had rural dial-up Internet, and was still writing actual letters. Now I am online all day long, have no time for letter writing, and would be the perfect candidate for Facebook…except that I went to library school and developed this little hangup about privacy.

Privacy…ah, Facebook how you smirk at my privacy concerns. Yes, I know that Beacon was a folly that you now regret, and this week’s terms of service kerfuffle may have been overblown. But to me these moves are indicators that you are a company that doesn’t think through the privacy implications before making changes.

And while actions speak louder than words, your words worry me too, Facebook. Your terms of service (the “old”/”reinstated” ones) make me worry that someday, maybe long into the future, many terms of service later, after you have been bought and the buyer bought and that buyer bought, I will someday see my then-adult son’s young face staring back at me from an advertisement for, well, who knows what. All because my cousin uploaded a photo of him after a family vacation in 2008.

By the way, note that this is not a privacy concern because I am doing anything illicit; it is privacy concern because I would feel violated at this use of my son without my express permission, even though it would be perfectly legal and within the terms of service to which the photo copyright owner agreed.

What can you do, Facebook, to earn my trust?

1) Change your terms of service. I don’t mean leave them as they are/were before you made everyone mad this week.  I mean change them all together. Stop requiring that we:

…automatically grant, and you represent and warrant that you have the right to grant, to the Company an irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid, worldwide license (with the right to sublicense) to use, copy, publicly perform, publicly display, reformat, translate, excerpt (in whole or in part) and distribute such User Content for any purpose, commercial, advertising, or otherwise, on or in connection with the Site or the promotion thereof, to prepare derivative works of, or incorporate into other works, such User Content, and to grant and authorize sublicenses of the foregoing.

I don’t care if you say you don’t want to put my son’s photo on a billboard, because what you say on your blog or to a reporter does not outweigh the legal contract you are asking people to sign/click through.

This is just plain creepy. And greedy. AND uncool to boot.

2) Start acting trustworthy. Make your privacy settings comprehensible to the average user. You’ve taken steps in this direction, but it really just isn’t enough.  Your aunt who still types emails in ALL CAPS should be able to understand her setting and their implications. Be clear about the risks and benefits of new apps. Don’t globally implement apps and then require people to opt-out of things; rather allow them to opt-in. Do good in the world.  Please.

Of course, half of me knows it’s a good thing for my own time management and personal life that I am not on Facebook. I could suck up hours tracking down all my teenage crushes and long-losts, and that’s really the last thing I need when I barely have the time for a cup of tea with my here-and-nows.  However, the other half of me – the one that wants to get sucked into staying up too late finding out how many kids so-and-so has and whether the morose violinist from my school bus days is still playing music or at least doing okay – offers these suggestions.  If you don’t take them, well, I’m sure in a few more years there will be a new social networking platform that everyone’s on, and maybe I’ll jump on board that time around.

-Greyson

Full disclosure here: I do *sort of* have a Facebook account. What I mean is that I have a fake Facebook account under a made up name, with virtually no information in it save a made up birthdate. I use this account for the times when I need to look something up that is only on Facebook. I rarely use it, and am forever forgetting my password, and have had to create a fake Gmail account under the same name to deal with the password reset requests…and this is just getting convoluted and complicated. I wish Facebook would just get its act together so I could join in good faith and stop pretending to be a 28 year old male online just to find out when a meeting will be happening.

Canadian Net Neutrality Consultation

For people who found this page while looking for info on April’s CRTC  “traffic shaping” consultation, go here.

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The CRTC’s “traffic management” (throttling) consultation is accepting comments from interested individuals right now.

This is the “Net Neutrality” consultation we’ve been waiting for. Many of us have asked the CRTC to hold this public consultation and it is happening.

Let’s make our voices heard!

The CRTC says:

“Members of the public who wish merely to file written comments in this proceeding, without receiving copies of the various submissions, may do so by filing such comments with the Commission by 16 February 2009 at the address or fax number noted above, or by filling out the online form.”

I know these CRTC “public” consultations can be byzantine and hard to know how to respond to.   If you want to participate, here are two options:

• The online form to submit comments is here.

OR

• You can quickly & easily send a boilerplate comment via the Campaign for Democratic Media’s Save Our Net coalition, right here.

Comment period closes Feb 23, so don’t procrastinate.

Need Some Background?

• The CRTC public notice can be found here.
• The Save Our Net coalition has background info in language that is comprehensible by regular people here.
• The Canadian Library Association’s 2008 resolution in support of Net Neutrality explains why this is a library issue here.
• Michael Geist’s take and useful links on this consultation cam be read here.
• For “Net Neutrality 101” see my backgrounder from last spring here

-Greyson

Anti-ethnic penguin update

I have received a reply to my query about the “anti-ethnic” allegations against “And Tango Makes Three” (for background see previous post on the topic).

The ALA Office of Intellectual Freedom was kind enough to explain to me that the OIF compiles their reports based on both newspaper reports of book challenges and the forms people send in when an item is challenged. My understanding from the email is that the only info that can be made public from the forms (most is confidential) is: the state and type of institution in which the challenge was made, item title, and the categories of the challenge. Hopefully we can find out a little bit more about the specific challenge(s) in which “anti-ethnic” was selected as an objection to “Tango” (e.g. did someone just challenge in every category possible, or what).

Second, Angela from the OIF also gave me some more examples of books that have been challenged under “anti-ethnic” grounds, such as: The Good Earth, Little Black Sambo, The Summer of My German Soldier, Song of Solomon (which happens to be one of my favourite books of all time), Little House on the Prairie, and The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian. You might notice that all of those books, unlike “Tango” actually deal with ethnic and/or racialised portrayals of human beings. In my follow up query I have also asked whether she knows of any items other than “Tango” and “Maus” that have non-human characters and have been challenged as anti-ethnic.

Finally, I’ve gotten quite curious about the evolution of the ALA challenge report form. How did the categories develop/evolve? I understand that there is no guidance as to how to interpret the different challenge categories, but I am now quite curious as to how the form was made, revised, etc. I’ve asked the OIF, but I know they are quite busy at ALA central, so if anyone reading this has any scoop on the history of the report forms, please let me know.

-Greyson