Page 2 of 5 FirstFirst 12345 LastLast
Results 16 to 30 of 65

Thread: Glad I never joined Facebook

  1. #16
    Join Date
    Sep 2013
    Location
    Wayland, MA
    Posts
    3,655
    I don't get the outrage. I've always assumed that pretty much everything I publish in the interweb is public and always will be-- I've found posts I made in the late '70's back when it was Arpanet and the recipe site at Stanford was the coolest new thing. Accordingly I only post things I don't mind having publicly known. FB's TOS pretty much says they will use your information for a very wide variety of things, making it very widely available. How can people be surprised? Much less outraged? FB is no different than any other interweb service, they traffic in information. Though the current management of SMC is benevolent I do not assume it will always be so-- once they sell out for a trillion dollars all the details of my woodworking habits will be widely available. I make sure I don't care, by not publishing anything here that I don't feel comfortable publishing to the world.

    If you want to be reasonably secure use TOR and a VPN for browsing and public key encryption for your email, but if NSA or the Russians want to read it I bet they can. Best is to keep private things private.

    I use and enjoy FB, I've become well acquainted with folks from around the world I might not otherwise have met. I have interactions on my various hobby interests that far surpass what was available to me previously. There are great FB groups on player pianos and old phonographs, for example, where the signal/noise ratio is very high compared even to the hobbiest print publications. I've reconnected with old friends and have active rekindled relationships on and off the computer. The price seems to be that ads can be targeted to me. Ad Block Pro eliminates about 95% of those so it doesn't seem such a big deal.

  2. #17
    Join Date
    Nov 2007
    Location
    NW Indiana
    Posts
    3,078
    I use Facebook for only immediate family and it works fine. I think that I only have about 12 friends and limit my posts to them only and not to share with anyone else. Between it and my phone, it is a good way to stay close to family. I could care less about how many friends or likes I get.

    I also assume that anything that I post on the web can be seen by anybody. I prefer using sites where I do not use my real name.

  3. #18
    Join Date
    Mar 2003
    Location
    SE PA - Central Bucks County
    Posts
    65,688
    A lot of what the concern with Facebook is about is either controllable through settings or controllable by behavior. When folks use the "app platform", they fail to understand or acknowledge to themselves that they are exposing information that they have the ability to keep contained merely by not using apps, such as games, logging into other sites using Facebook credentials, etc. And folks who choose to participate in the ever-popular question and answer stuff or "like" and repost so-called (fraud) contests, etc., are further exposing themselves. Social networks can be a very good thing and are quite enjoyable. But using them without thought around personal information exposure can turn that around very quickly. Too many people join and just presume that the default settings are good enough. They are not.

    My settings are customized to maintain the level of information exposure I'm comfortable with and I enjoy interacting with friends, HS classmates, family and folks with similar interests. I don't play games and the "app platform" was disabled on my account years ago. I don't post things publicly with minor exceptions which are carefully considered. I don't do any of the "question and answer" things nor do I fall for the fake give-aways...you know the ones where they are going to just give away several motorhomes to some lucky folks who like their page and re-post the "contest". I don't click on videos I frequently receive via Messenger...many have nefarious purposes. I do like pages and vendors I appreciate and find that in many cases, getting help is actually faster through social media than by other communication channels. I do review restaurants that I've visited and appreciated. And my new business will have both a Facebook and Twitter presence once things are up and running to my standards and the marketing benefits can be explored.
    Last edited by Jim Becker; 03-22-2018 at 7:43 PM.
    --

    The most expensive tool is the one you buy "cheaply" and often...

  4. #19
    Quote Originally Posted by roger wiegand View Post
    I don't get the outrage. I've always assumed that pretty much everything I publish in the interweb is public and always will be-- I've found posts I made in the late '70's back when it was Arpanet and the recipe site at Stanford was the coolest new thing. Accordingly I only post things I don't mind having publicly known. FB's TOS pretty much says they will use your information for a very wide variety of things, making it very widely available. How can people be surprised? Much less outraged? FB is no different than any other interweb service, they traffic in information. Though the current management of SMC is benevolent I do not assume it will always be so-- once they sell out for a trillion dollars all the details of my woodworking habits will be widely available. I make sure I don't care, by not publishing anything here that I don't feel comfortable publishing to the world.

    If you want to be reasonably secure use TOR and a VPN for browsing and public key encryption for your email, but if NSA or the Russians want to read it I bet they can. Best is to keep private things private.

    I use and enjoy FB, I've become well acquainted with folks from around the world I might not otherwise have met. I have interactions on my various hobby interests that far surpass what was available to me previously. There are great FB groups on player pianos and old phonographs, for example, where the signal/noise ratio is very high compared even to the hobbiest print publications. I've reconnected with old friends and have active rekindled relationships on and off the computer. The price seems to be that ads can be targeted to me. Ad Block Pro eliminates about 95% of those so it doesn't seem such a big deal.
    I think perhaps you misunderstand my objection to Facebook. I understand what they do with people's personal data. And if people understand what Facebook is up to and accept it, that's fine and good.

    What I object to is the idea that the whole purpose of Facebook is to learn personal details about me and about my "friends" and to use that information to make money - they are monetizing my personal information. And because of my objections to what they do, I do not use Facebook.

    I post things on the web, including technical papers and tutorials, with the intent of sharing those with others. If people get some value from that I'm happy. But I really don't like being *pushed" for personal information so that someone can make money from that information - the way Facebook does.

    And while you may limit who can see your information on Facebook, one "person" who can see it all and harvest it is Facebook. If you use Facebook, they will get personal information from you. If you share pictures taken on a smartphone, they can get the location where that picture was taken and realize you were on vacation. That (and a lot more) goes into their dossier of you. If you do a "facebook login" at another site, Facebook knows you went there and that's in your dossier, also. In a very short time they know a great deal about you. Perhaps more than your spouse.

    Mike

    [There's been studies that have determine that if given some relatively small number of your "likes" they can categorize you with suprisingly high accuracy.]
    Last edited by Mike Henderson; 03-22-2018 at 10:12 PM.
    Go into the world and do well. But more importantly, go into the world and do good.

  5. #20
    Join Date
    Feb 2003
    Location
    Doylestown, PA
    Posts
    7,551
    The biggest risk to Facebook (IMO of course) is not to the typical Creeker but to the young and/or naive. Young people put stuff on Facebook and other social media.that they will likely regret in the future because they don't know any better. I'm not on Facebook but if I were for purposes of signing into another site, I'd probably have an account with a profile that would cause their analytic engines to get very confused.

  6. #21
    Join Date
    Apr 2011
    Location
    north, OR
    Posts
    1,160
    Quote Originally Posted by Jim Becker View Post
    When folks use the "app platform", they fail to understand or acknowledge to themselves that they are exposing information that they have the ability to keep contained merely by not using apps, such as games, logging into other sites using Facebook credentials, etc. And folks who choose to participate in the ever-popular question and answer stuff or "like" and repost so-called (fraud) contests, etc., are further exposing themselves.
    Somewhat more disturbing is that when a person uses an app they are also often (but not always) agreeing to share their contacts/friends information as well as their own. Imaging that happened in real life:

    Random Person: knocks on your door
    You: opens door, hello
    Random Person: Heeey I've got this cool IQ test you can take for free!
    You: .. umm.. ok.. what's the catch
    Random Person: Just share with me a bunch of your personal information, like show me your photo albums man.
    You: not sure about this..
    Random Person: Aaaaand a bunch of information you happen to know about all your friends

    This starts to seem a wee bit creepier. I'm virtually positive that most people don't realize the latter part happens in addition to them sharing information about themselves. Unsurprisingly there was a HUGE uptick in these sorts of "free tests" (which were also personality profiling) right before the last several elections (yes several).

    Again, it only matters as much as you're willing to share stuff and what you believe is/is not public so its mostly a mismatch of expectations. The recent kerfluffle also involved some likely TOS violations or at least some downstream contractual breaches that look like TOS violations (who knew what when determines culpability and I don't know any of that). I'm mostly with Roger, if you're putting things on the internet they're pretty public for the most part even when you don't expect them to be initially (I don't however share his trust in TOR for various reasons ).

    I do have to unfollow or otherwise hide a fair bit of garbage people "reshare" which is pretty annoying at times (you can somewhat easily block the shared-from accounts but they do move around some and people susceptible to getting hooked in liking that sort of thing tend to follow the spam to its new accounts unfortunately).

  7. #22
    Join Date
    Jan 2009
    Location
    N.E, Ohio
    Posts
    3,026
    Quote Originally Posted by Bruce Page View Post
    I deactivated my FB account yesterday.
    So did I. I did not use it and had next to no information on my page.
    George

    Making sawdust regularly, occasionally a project is completed.

  8. #23
    Join Date
    Mar 2006
    Location
    SoCal
    Posts
    22,494
    Blog Entries
    1
    Quote Originally Posted by Andrew Joiner View Post

    I'm asking if Sawmillcreek is different from facebook as far as security.
    I'm not tech smart but are there potential risks to being on here?
    The key element of your security is you. Use the mindset that anything and everything you have ever done online is available to those who know how to look. Do not expect to be "cared for". I have been banging this drum since we used to dial-in to bulletin boards. Take a picture of a check to deposit it and trust Verizon or AT&T to keep my traffic secure? Yeah, right. Not this Orwellian knuckle-dragger. I suppose being in the business since Automated Teller Machines were new and frightening molds my views somewhat. Its like getting a peek behind the curtain in any business. There are things the average customer really doesn't want to know. Unfortunately when it comes to your personal information security, you really need to know.

    -- rant off.
    "A hen is only an egg's way of making another egg".


    – Samuel Butler

  9. #24
    Join Date
    May 2005
    Location
    Highland MI
    Posts
    4,511
    Blog Entries
    11
    I didn't join FB until I had retired and had more time to spend there. When my credit cards get hacked, not likely from any of my FB activity. FB has allowed my to keep in touch with friends, now out of town, and relatives like never before. FB groups are a great way to imbibe in your hobbies or other interests. I even started a FB group for folks with LS engines in their Jeeps, nearly 150 members now after only a month. Joined a group called Church Sound and Media Techs, now over 47,000 members worldwide, the go-to place for all church tech questions and comments. Of course there are huge downsides, the biggest to me is the awful division you see politically with all of the name-calling, trolling and fake news. You just have to put on your filter hat and skip over that swill. Before I learned to golf 10 years ago, I thought it was pretty stupid to chase a little white ball around.
    NOW you tell me...

  10. #25
    Join Date
    Nov 2008
    Location
    Northern Oregon
    Posts
    1,820

    Smile

    Quote Originally Posted by Ryan Mooney View Post
    Somewhat more disturbing is that when a person uses an app they are also often (but not always) agreeing to share their contacts/friends information as well as their own. Imaging that happened in real life:

    Random Person: knocks on your door
    You: opens door, hello
    Random Person: Heeey I've got this cool IQ test you can take for free!
    You: .. umm.. ok.. what's the catch
    Random Person: Just share with me a bunch of your personal information, like show me your photo albums man.
    You: not sure about this..
    Random Person: Aaaaand a bunch of information you happen to know about all your friends

    This starts to seem a wee bit creepier. I'm virtually positive that most people don't realize the latter part happens in addition to them sharing information about themselves. Unsurprisingly there was a HUGE uptick in these sorts of "free tests" (which were also personality profiling) right before the last several elections (yes several).

    Again, it only matters as much as you're willing to share stuff and what you believe is/is not public so its mostly a mismatch of expectations. The recent kerfluffle also involved some likely TOS violations or at least some downstream contractual breaches that look like TOS violations (who knew what when determines culpability and I don't know any of that). I'm mostly with Roger, if you're putting things on the internet they're pretty public for the most part even when you don't expect them to be initially (I don't however share his trust in TOR for various reasons ).

    I do have to unfollow or otherwise hide a fair bit of garbage people "reshare" which is pretty annoying at times (you can somewhat easily block the shared-from accounts but they do move around some and people susceptible to getting hooked in liking that sort of thing tend to follow the spam to its new accounts unfortunately).
    Great explanation Ryan, thanks.

    I'm amazed at how much my real, actual social life is affected by social media. The discussions my friends have tend to be about screen images. Especially younger friends and family. I see how addicting it is.

    Heck, I love communicating here and this might be a social media of a sort. I've learned a lot and shared a lot of my experience. I've gotten to know some great people on here, even met some in person.

    Wonderful idea to keep it politics free here. I really can't see our forum being "mined" for much real gold. I don't think CNN or Fox want headlines like "99% of hand tool woodworkers can't agree on a sharpening method"
    "Whether you think you can, or you think you can’t - you’re right."
    - Henry Ford

  11. #26
    How is Sawmillcreek different from facebook?
    Not huge differences...

    FaceBook allows you great control over the posts and items you see, and you can add things like Social Fixer to further gain control. SMC and other forums have very limited controls on that, but some.

    Forums like this are generally topic-specific, FB is obviously general.

    FB is a great tool to stay in touch with friends all over the world, and do things I wouldn't otherwise get an opportunity to do. I have also met up with people from forums, but it's less likely to happen since it's more focused on a topic.

    A post on FB asking for wood advice will probably get very few if any useful responses. Here you will get a lot of useful ideas. Even though I have several woodworker friends on FB, it's really not helpful to talk about it there.

    On both platforms you are the product, via ads. But FB goes a lot further in targeted data. I use an ad blocker and Social Fixer, so in both cases, my data is limited and I don't see ads.

  12. #27
    Join Date
    Feb 2003
    Location
    Conway, Arkansas
    Posts
    13,181
    I'm on FB and have been for a long time. It is my connection to old friends, family members that live far from me, and keeping up with my kids. I don't like everything about FB but as a Keep in touch tool with family and friends....it's a great tool for that.
    Thanks & Happy Wood Chips,
    Dennis -
    Get the Benefits of Being an SMC Contributor..!
    ....DEBT is nothing more than yesterday's spending taken from tomorrow's income.

  13. #28
    Join Date
    Feb 2003
    Location
    Hayes, Virginia
    Posts
    14,760
    Ad blockers will soon be the reason that SawMill Creek goes back to a user supported Community. I understand why this is happening but everyone should realize that there will be massive fallout from the changes ahead, not just here but everywhere on the Internet. When we block advertising we stop the funds that pay for all of the free services we enjoy including SawMill Creek.

    Our advertising is being crippled to the point that we will soon be behind a curtain with no free access and zero search engine activity. At that point there will be complete privacy here, something a lot of people will enjoy but there is a flip side to that coin. I'm not sure at this point whether we will survive but we will adjust to whatever direction the majority here prefer to go as we always have.

    FWIW Visitor access (Non Registered) will be the first thing eliminated when we convert to Xenforo in the near future. Anyone who is not registered will not be able to view threads, posts or pictures here very soon. When this happens we will lose all of our advertisers real quick and be sitting on our own bottom so to speak. In plain English I am not nor have I ever been in control of this Community...you are. Years ago we were an advertising free Community and when we grew beyond what we could afford to support you made the decision that you wanted advertising to pay the bills so we could continue free access for everyone. Now that you are blocking advertising your making the decision to go back to a user supported Community. I am fine with any decision the majority here makes and I will accept our fate no matter what happens.

    FaceBook and all of the other sites that are taking advantage of people for monetary gain are driving the changes that are ahead. Unfortunately we are caught up in this mess and will probably have to make some very difficult decisions, like the ones I stated above, in the near future.

    I have never sold any information from this site even though I have been offered serious money to do so. Note that your email addresses are not publicly accessible and that's what is most valuable here. I have never accepted offers I have received to amortize our advertising capability even though I have received at least ten offers every week for many years. Turning over the rains to these vampires would produce serious income but selling my soul is not something I can live with. I have also received dozens of offers to purchase SawMill Creek and with each offer the price goes up by unbelievable amounts. I have only sent out one mass email in over fifteen years and that was an announcement concerning our tenth anniversary. I receive plenty of handsome offers to mass email you people from companies all over the globe and I have refused every one of them. I could go on for hours sharing what I believe the differences are between SawMill Creek and Facebook but I think the majority of you know the score.

    I'm still here which should prove to everyone where my heart is, I hope it does at least to the majority of you folks and all of my friends.
    .
    Last edited by Keith Outten; 03-23-2018 at 12:58 PM.

  14. #29
    Join Date
    Apr 2011
    Location
    north, OR
    Posts
    1,160
    Quote Originally Posted by Carlos Alvarez View Post
    A post on FB asking for wood advice will probably get very few if any useful responses. Here you will get a lot of useful ideas. Even though I have several woodworker friends on FB, it's really not helpful to talk about it there.
    On the contrary if you're in the right groups. I'm in a woodcarving group and a green woodworking group both of which are generally fantastic resources. The antique spinning wheel group has also been able to identify and help repair several interesting wheels (some of the woodworking there I perhaps take a small exception to in the context of restoring antiques but it is what it is). There are some other groups on there that I know are really good (the cigar box guitar group for instance) that I've refrained from joining because I don't need more projects

  15. #30
    Quote Originally Posted by Ryan Mooney View Post
    On the contrary if you're in the right groups. I'm in a woodcarving group and a green woodworking group both of which are generally fantastic resources. The antique spinning wheel group has also been able to identify and help repair several interesting wheels (some of the woodworking there I perhaps take a small exception to in the context of restoring antiques but it is what it is). There are some other groups on there that I know are really good (the cigar box guitar group for instance) that I've refrained from joining because I don't need more projects
    Yeah, groups vary a lot in quality. And even day to day. I'm in a Jeep group that's an off-shoot of the state Jeep forum. The anti-FB people whine that the FB group sucks and everyone there is stupid. The hardcore FB users whine that the forum is too hard to use (it is when you want to post trail pics with a mobile phone). Both have their good and bad. I use both. I get more hard info from the forum, in general.

    Ad blockers will soon be the reason that SawMill Creek goes back to a user supported Community. I understand why this is happening but everyone should realize that there will be massive fallout from the changes ahead, not just here but everywhere on the Internet. When we block advertising we stop the funds that pay for all of the free services we enjoy including SawMill Creek.
    I very much look forward to it. I tend to sample groups and forums, then support them if they have that ability. I run a large motorcycle forum, and simply collect donations as the funds dry up. So far (since 2002), it has worked perfectly. We have never had an ad, and I rejected a $10k offer to have our site join an ad-supported motorsports network. I'm not willing to trade my brain space for anything, but I will pay with cash if it provides value.

    I don't understand how ads can make any sense for anyone. I've never clicked one in my life, and can't imagine why anyone ever would.

Posting Permissions

  • You may not post new threads
  • You may not post replies
  • You may not post attachments
  • You may not edit your posts
  •