Facebook - Please Stop Being Greedy For Information!

[H.O.D 0]

This thread was meant to be written more than two months ago, but after I typed it out and lost all of it to a power failure, I sort of lost the motivation to type all of it again! Anyway, better late than never; here I go again! Facebook's latest modification - the timeline- has now been pushed onto the general public, and it will only be a few more weeks before all the users are forced to break down their "wall" and start using their timeline. This new timeline appears to be very greedy for information, and Facebook encourages the users to fill in all sorts of information from their lives, beginning from their day of birth!If you've seen the introductory video to timeline, you would have noticed that the sample account shown in the video has all major milestones in the person's life, beginning from baby pictures, high school graduation, getting married, and so on. Not everyone will put so much information online, but there will also be a LOT of users who would be thrilled to put up more information about themselves, just to impress their friends! There are indeed millions of such people out there, and the timeline offers them more options to show off. But there is an important thing which is being forgotten, and it is that Facebook is greedy. It is very greedy for personal information. The major criticism for Facebook has always been the way it handles personal information collected from its users. The privacy options are either not strong enough or not flexible enough. So most users end up either blocking most of their content, or else they put all of it out in the open. Both options are unfeasible, and are irritating to regular users of the website.My major complaint about the timeline is that it is a curse for power users of Facebook. These are the people who spend many hours per day, putting a lot of their information online. Now they need to dig through all of this information and decide which is fit to be shown on the timeline, and which needs to be hidden. This could be hundreds or even thousands of posts! It might have been less than ten years since Facebook started, but in this short time it has garnered millions of posts from users, and all these posts need to be reviewed by their owners to be properly hidden from the timeline. After this time-consuming process is done, there is no guarantee that Facebook will not come up with another brilliant idea to change the user interface, and the same curating process needs to be repeated yet again!Even assuming that the timeline is here to stay for a long time, there is still the major problem that it encourages sharing of too much information. It only takes a few clicks of the mouse to add a new life event. New information, new privacy tensions. One might ask, "Why post at all?" But the minds of Facebook addicts work in a very different way. These people always share a lot of their information online, and they spend half of their day at Facebook.The timeline shows how greedy the company has gotten, and how risky it is to share information on Facebook now. Now that the company has offered its own IPO, I hope there is more careful restructuring done from now on, without making drastic changes that only worsen privacy issues.

[mahesh2k 0]

I did few changes in the timeline and it seems to be working fine for me. I made category of restricted list and the family. Whenever I share something it gets sorted as per that category and it is quite safe as the sharing restriction applies. In case of restricted list they can only see what i want them to see. I find this type of restriction fair. I have also removed the "find user from search" feature. I have disabled it in order to avoid the members from searching me. I only search members based on their URLs if they notify me via email or friend of a friend. I don't think facebook is after personal information of users like google. They have a limited internet presence and are restricted to their own domain. I am scared of google which is after every keystroke and personal information. Their recent move to connect all the services to fetch more personal information is dangerous as they're not only social network but leading ad agency and share the data using google keyword tool. Google's connecting multiple profiles and friends using this feature is so annoying that I get results favored by friends which doesn't match my taste. For example, I get result of jazz and rock music where my music taste is trance. So you see google is literally digging my friends taste, my ip, my searches and other stuff which i don't want to share as i don't want salesman slapping ads on my internet experience all the time. Google or facebook both seems to be something that are scary. It's just that interaction with facebook ends if you delete the account but interaction with google remains even if you delete the account, as they use search crawlers to stalk behavior of people. Google seems to be lot greedy about information than facebook for sure. That's the reason many users are not moving to google+ as of now. Not just these two companies but other companies are also after personal information of people and asking lots of vague things in forms to understand customers more.