On 1/31/2015 6:59 AM, Mayayana wrote:
| * LinkedIn, Facebook: No one who cares about privacy
| at all could possibly use LinkedIn or Facebook or GMail
| or Chrome or anything else from Google. That's the simple
| fact of the matter.
|
| They only compromise privacy as much as users allow them to. The default
| settings are awful and need to be changed but they know that few users
| will take the time to do so. Tracking needs to be disabled and
| advertising needs to be blocked. It's not all that different than
| putting yourself on the Do Not Call list, filtering out the problem
| posters and tea-baggers on alt.home.repair and other Usenet groups,
| having an unlisted phone number, and opting out of direct mail
| advertising. Yes it requires a small amount of effort, but there are
| benefits to sites like LinkedIn as well.
|

Putting yourself on the Do Not Call list does not
involve first publishing details of your private life.
With LinkedIn you're voluntarily posting your resume.
With Facebook you're allowing an advertising company
to host much of your social life. I'm continually
astonished that people go along with that. But it's
not entirely mysterious. Online ad companies have
used two very successful strategies:

On Facebook, you're only sharing as much of your life as you want to
share. You don't have to give your real birthday or real life history
and you probably should not do so just because of the risk of identity
theft.

Facebook has proven to be invaluable as a broadcast tool for school
organizations and you can have closed groups which are open by
invitation only. I.e. my son's marching band does most of their
communications via Facebook including posting videos of competitions,
notices of practices and rehearsals, etc. To do that with e-mail would
be a real pain in the butt.