Sure, every geek thinks that, including me. How then are they supposed to make money? ‘Cause if they don’t, they won’t survive, and another company who’s willing to do the same darn thing will arise.

Dan

As an aside, your web server is serving up this page as ISO-8859-1 instead of UTF-8, which is making the word naiveté render wrong. Might want to contact netspace.org.

Cheers,
CMP

I found this post, which might be useful to the people out there who want to use facebook but block beacon. (and the privacy settings, or opting-out of some of it, doesn’t mean the information isn’t being collected, as the following post explains quite clearly!) http://www.ideashower.com/blog/block-facebook-beacon/

I followed their steps, and it was very easy to do. I suppose I’m one of the paranoid ones who is a lot more worried about the info that’s being collected while I’m unaware than about the information that I consciously make available via profiles and posted personal information.

If default settings of SN sites does not reveal anything including profile photos and searh results, then how can one get invited and connect with people they know? Not very social or networky there.

I won’t be suprised, howevr, if online privacy advocates go overboard and target addressbook importers. After all, importers allow people to mass search and spam.

Yeah, let’s just all hang out at moveon or peta.org both very engaging sites, no?

Btw, Danah, is this real fur?
http://berkeley.facebook.com/friends.php?id=559436770

For Facebook and a lot of other companies, the problem is that what makes Facebook money, the advertising, is useless to the user. We want Facebook as a place to put our information, but we don’t want them to do anything with it. But to make money, they have to use that information. So long as that’s the basic structure, there’s going to be conflicts.

In response to Alison- like you said, “trusting Facebook users” are generally older folk- I think they’re more open to publicizing their online profiles because they’re seeking to make connections, they’re gaining from the public exposure and excited by all the novel possibilities. My ethnography of social networking sites primarily re/presents the voices of college students- particularly veteran Facebook users. The site started out as being a great little niche environment, so people could exchange intimate messages and upload photos from that crazy party where everyone was on a ton of drugs and so on. Then it opened up, everyone was pissed, and that’s when attitudes toward Facebook started to shift.

Most first-generation Facebookers have some degree of distrust/disgust for the site, often a great deal of it. Yet they continue to use it because it’s become so firmly integrated into campus social life- it’s a way to easily invite people to parties and share photos from said parties, to visually organize one’s social network and keep track of alumni and old high school buddies, to find out the sexuality or relationship status of that boy you’ve been admiring from afar. It’s crucial. If you’re not on Facebook, you’re probably going to miss out on some social gossip, or not get invited to some parties.

Such important social practices generally take precedence over the egregious invasions of privacy that most are highly suspicious of. The trend is not abandoning Facebook- it’s far too useful. However, the site’s reputation is definitely tainted, and some Facebookers are using the site to form or join groups that promote awareness of Facebook’s privacy policies and petition for change. Most, however, are simply becoming more savvy and protective of their online personas; it’s become increasingly common for me to be unable to access the profiles of those I’m not friends with because of that practice. There’s also a huge trend to apathetically accept that nothing can be done about it, much like how a lot of young people feel about our government.

Again, these are just observations of the changing attitudes among a specific subset of Facebook users. They know what’s going on (though I would say that only the Tech-savvy blog-readers have even heard about Project Beacon- but they know their information is being used for capitalist endeavors), they’re disgruntled that so much of what they do on Facebook is publicly broadcast and forever archived. Regardless of how they talk about it, however, they’re still using it regularly for everyday social practices. For many, it’s become as habitual to check Facebook as it is to check e-mail.

Personally, I don’t find this trend exciting, liberating or convenient in the slightest. I find it insidious.