finalfight wrote:Arkansas wrote:finalfight wrote: ... Someone should sue the b@stards that created it for impeding their freedom. ...
So much for personal responsibility, huh?
Facebook doesn't kill people. People kill people.
Facebook doesn't divulge info. People do.
If people didn't use it, it would go away on its own.
Too much 'hey look at me!' bull$hit in this world.
later~
My problem is that non Facebook users are also dragged into this quagmire as there is absolutely nothing stopping them from being mentioned in someone's status or wall or tagged in photographs. This information then does the rounds and eventually gets back to the right or wrong people. It's a cesspool, a breeding ground of unwarranted gossip and Chinese whispers.
Case in point, I know of a Facebook user that put pictures of her child's first day at school on their supposedly secure account only allowing access to family and close friends. A family member who lived several hundreds of miles away tagged the photos and put them on their own Facebook account which did not have restricted access. Now via a simple Google search the estranged father of the person who originally posted the photos 'securely' was able to track down family members, in this case the Auntie, and not only see that his daughter had a child but also know exactly were the little girl went to school due to the uniform in the photo.
Imagine the shock when the mother turned up and the school one day to find 'grandpa' (an ex-con with a violent history) chatting to the granddaughter he had no right to see. Needless to say it was a very heated, unwarranted and downright scary situation for both mother and child. Imagine if she had gone home with grandpa - after all he had gotten this far unquestioned.
Farcebook breeds jealously and mistrust and ends as many relationships as it creates. This downright dangerous network is a predators paradise and people need to very, very careful when using it.
It beggars belief with the current levels of unemployment that people will openly state how much they hate their job or berate their colleagues when all it takes is a few clicks of a button for this information to become public knowledge. It's simply astounding!
If you want to stay in touch with people safely email, write a letter or God forbid use the phone (and I don't mean txt)! And hope to hell that person isn't a Facebook user unless you want the contents divulged to one and all.
As is normal in situations like these (i.e. these kinds of stalker stories, people who kill over a videogame, etc.), you are citing the most extreme worst case examples to demonize it. Like someone else said, accountability is key. If you're THAT worried about something like an ex-con family member showing up, do not put them on there, period. Likewise for job rantings, compromising pictures of drunkenness or partial nudity, etc etc.
The troubles start at ground zero - DON'T do stupid shit. In this day and age of technology, digital preservation and distribution and what not, if you put something out there, there is ALWAYS the chance it could come back, whether it's through Facebook, MySpace, a "private" e-mail intercepted by company executives, or hell, even on a message board like this. In this instance, the person could have gladly shared the photos with family and friends in person or via e-mail with a disclaimer to keep them private. The blame still ultimately lies with them - nothing's secure or encrypted to a T any more, not even the online stores that store all your identity information in "encrypted" databases.
I keep a Facebook so people can find me and send me messages if they are coming back in town or whatever. I have friends that are working in Argentina and China with no other way to get in touch with me, and some day it'll be nice to be able to look up old friends that have gone their own way. I don't put dumb pictures on there, I don't post my phone number (that's what private messages are for if someone needs it), and I don't give out my address.
People are responsible for the shit that ends up on there, not the site.
With that said, this story is extremely sad, but an Internet Web site did not make that nutjob do what he did. He would have found some other reason to snap, such as when she served him with divorce papers, no doubt about that.