On Sat, 31 Jan 2015 17:52:42 -0800, SMS
wrote:

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.

I dont agree. Before facebook, email lists were common. All that band
would need to do is create an Addressbook for all band members, and send
out a notice to all of them at once. JPG omages can easily be sent to
the email list also. While I suppose videos can also be sent by email,
It's probably easier to just post them to a common website, which almost
every ISP have for free. Making a simple website with nothing but the
band's name and a few lines of text, and a place to post videos is
probably easier than setting up a facebook acct. (and a lot safer).

By the way, since Facebook has a link on damn near every website these
days, you dont need all sorts of software to block them. Windows has a
file called "HOSTS". I have facebook blocked and I never see their crap
on websites, I just see a box that says "cannot connect to facebook".
Since facebook uses around 25 different links to spam the internet, I
have about 25 entries in my HOSTS file, just for them, and have more for
Twitter, LinkedIn, and other social network sites, and also blocks for
many dangerous sites and advertising sites such as "doubleclick".

I'm assuming Windows 8.xx still has a HOSTS file.... My newest OS is
XP. The hosts file was used in Window 98 and up (maybe Win95 too).

If I had kids in school, I'd be really ****ed if they made my kid use
facebook, espacially when I have it blocked.