So for
awhile, I simply “rather spend time on something else”.
The reasons were different. The main one being the demise of my pet
project. The music player (see various posts here [1]) for roleplaying.
The player was built on the idea of tagging, but my approach of using an
md5 hash was just not working right. It was slow and sluggish and it
took about 10 seconds to start with about 5 songs and an eternity for
about 1 GB worth of music and sound effects. I couldn't improve it
for reasons I don't want to get into.
Once that fell
through, I decided to improve using Udacity [2] and hone my skills
(if one could call them that) by helping on the Mozilla Project [3] in the Automated Testing team (A*Team) [4]. This proved to
be such an enjoyable experience that I have stuck with it since
August of last year and spent most of my free-time on their IRC
channel trying to learn more about it and the way they run their
projects. By now, I have come to hate git [5] and only just about
accepted mercurial [6] as version control software.
Anyhow,
three paragraphs just to explain why I stopped blogging. Sheesh! Onto
the real reason for this blog entry. It is the new year which I
passed in lovely Vienna with my darling wife and a good friend from
there. During that time, a certain resolution ripened with me. I want
to opt out of this facebook harrassment (from now on referred to by
its french joke name fessebouc; la fesse = buttock, le bouc = goat; Why I do that? Because I can). Everyone
sees it as this fantastic tool, but over the course of last year,
fessebouc has annoyed
me greatly with some decisions they made.
It
started off harmlessly enough with them wanting to change my user
interface to this timeline idea [7] that they fancied so much. They first
asked me if I wanted it, as in “Do you want to try our new and
great timeline”, to which I said No.
Several weeks after, the same request came, to which I said again No.
Why change something that isn't broken, for crying out loud. And then
shortly after, they just changed it. Just like that. All illusion of
being able to decide it myself gone by virtue of their little display
of power. I am sure they thought that “he won't mind anyway, the
old chap.” ... Well, I did mind and it pissed me off so much that I
wrote a complaint in which I said, that these sort of measures are
more likely to drive me away than endear me to fessebouc.
Of course, there was no answer. Not even a hint.
Well,
that was me already annoyed by them. But then there followed a
consistent stream of these things that were handled the same way.
First a mail saying that if you don't want it, say so, with the
subsequent change to it anyways. The more outrageous changes were,
however, yet to come! Let's start with forcing anyone to use their real name [8, 9 for policy]. Why on earth?!? No conscious thought were given to
those rather sensitive cases where someone may truly endanger himself
by publically stating his opinion in countries where freedom of
speech is not as existent as in the western world (as an example of the merits read this article [10]) or the much quoted teacher-pupil relationship
problem. This is a very sensitive area as adolescents may unknowingly endanger the teacher's career by bringing him into a dicey situation. If they want to become "friends" with the teacher, is s/he supposed to block any attempt or is it no problem? Using an alias would be a good solution for a teacher in this case to avoid any such issues with accepting pupils as friends. "Friends" - Such a freely used term
nowadays. When before it defined a close relationship with someone
who is not the partner nor has familial ties to the person, now it
can describe someone who is not even an acquaintance.
But I'm getting diverted from the real issue here.
Now,
looking at the above problem, one may think: “No problem, I just
set my privacy setting so that people can't find me with a name search.” Well,
the clever people from fessebouc
thought of this, too, by getting rid of this possibility and making every profile available for all search engines [11,12 for German]. Again, why on earth?!? To me,
this really was the final nail in the coffin.
Thus
on New Year's, I came to the conclusion that I will stop using it. It
was a nuisance and e-mail spam that I accepted for the greater good
of keeping in touch with people who seem to only live in the world of
fessebouc and are
only reachable through it, but this is it. I have had enough. I am
aware that it is here to stay and unlikely to go away. I am also
aware that not only fessebouc
adopts dubious policies regarding privacy in the digital space, but
in this case, I can do
something about it and I don't want to play any part in it
anymore. I will also try to discourage people from posting pictures
of me on it. If you, as a fessebouc user
read this, please consider this a polite request to refrain from
posting pictures with me in it on fessebouc (or
any other media as a matter of fact without my explicit permission).
Thus, my New Year's Resolution for 2013 is to leave fessebouc
and be done with it. May it go its merry way, I hope it falls flat on
its face (which it most likely won't) and that the people responsible
for these decisions understand that the privacy of the individual
should be respected even though the majority of people “doesn't
seem to mind.”
References
[2] http://www.udacity.com/
[3] http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/contribute/
[4] https://wiki.mozilla.org/Auto-tools
[5] http://git-scm.com/
[6] http://mercurial.selenic.com/
[7] http://www.facebook.com/about/timeline
[8] http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/02/08/facebook_real_names/
[9] http://www.facebook.com/help/292517374180078/
[10] http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2011/02/07/google-executive-wael-ghonim-admits-he-was-el-shaheed.html
[11] http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/12/12/facebook-changes-privacy-settings-again/
[12] http://www.spiegel.de/netzwelt/web/namenssuche-bei-facebook-privatsphaere-einstellungen-werden-simpler-a-872932.html
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